Oglala Sioux Tribe

Honoring Nations: David Gipp: Sovereignty, Education and United Tribes Technical College

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Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
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United Tribes Technical College President David Gipp discusses the impetus behind the establishment of United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) and the emergence of the tribal college movement, the growth of UTTC over the past four decades, and the critical roles tribal colleges and universities play in Native nations' efforts to rebuild their nations. 

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Gipp, David. "Sovereignty, Education and United Tribes Technical College." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 18, 2009. Presentation.

"Thank you, Megan. It's great to be here. I don't often miss these sessions as a member of the Board [of Governors], and I apologize for not being here the last two days. Unfortunately, my schedule was such that it was difficult to get here, but I finally made it. I'm always late but I usually get there, as they say. So it's great to be here and I look forward to the presentations yet that are to come for this morning. I want to thank you for the prayer this morning and especially, the prayer where we talk about those who are in our communities -- and we use the word [Lakota Language] ones -- the ones that are kind of out there and we don't always see, the ones that are what we call pitiful and are in need sometimes, and don't get the privileges we have of being at this table here today at especially such a prestigious place. Those are the people that I serve, and I'm sure that many of you serve back in your home communities, especially if you're either in an elected position or have been in one. You know those people and who they are, and you know that these are the people that we really stand for back in our communities. Many of them are traditional people, many of them hang onto their culture in very closed and close ways, and some of them suffer because of the issues of poverty. In fact, many of them do -- at least in my part of the country in North and South Dakota and Montana and in other parts as well. So I think of these people when we're here and when I'm having a good breakfast, or whatever it is, and I appreciate that. And I've had my share of life from those days as well, having come up in that respect. So I appreciate that prayer and we think of these people. I want to extend my condolences to the Hill family -- and to all of you for your losses in your family as well -- and our prayers and good wishes for you and all of those who are dear to you. We have those kinds of things that happen to us, in all of our families again, because we're human beings and we come from the good earth here. So I think of those kinds of things.

I listen to Chief [Oren] Lyons and his speech about what happened back at Wounded Knee and I think of December 15, 1890 when Sitting Bull was killed. And two weeks later, the first Wounded Knee happened and quite a number of our people were killed -- Lakota people who were, Minneconjou who were, Hunkpapa, some Oglalas, Blackfeet Sioux and many others that were within that band -- that were on their way in, by the way, to give up, if you will, coming off the prairie. And [they were] some of the very last to be brought into what was to become reservation life, to the kind of confinement that we have lived with for many, many now centuries. And we were giving up a way of life, our freedom, if you will, giving up our constitution, if you will -- our constitution as we knew it and understood it. And many of our tribal nations have historically gone through that from the time that Columbus landed -- mistakenly landed -- on the shores of North America and stole the first Indian, kidnapped and took him back before Queen Isabella, and those kinds of things. Today, those would be considered crimes against humanity and inhumane acts. Although sometimes our own government continues to justify those things, as Chief Lyons pointed out, at the highest levels of government.

And so we need to be sure that what we do -- and this is one of the things that I think Honoring Nations does -- is brings the very best of Indian Country forward of what we're doing, that we're human beings, that we're not 'savages,' that we're not 'uncivilized,' that in fact we have our own civilizations and we have our own way of doing things and we have our own methodologies, all of these things that you know better than I do. And those are the presentations that we give to America -- and we have given freely and openly -- but we need to share them among ourselves so that those people that I talked about, the [Lakota language] ones, can benefit and can learn and talk about that. I talked to one of my students the other day, who has dreams of coming to Harvard. I don't know if he'll ever get here, hopefully he will, if that's what his dream is -- there are other places I told him he can go to school too, but we'll deal with that one later. Those are the kinds of things we look at when we talk about opportunity, because it's opportunity that -- as an educator --that we want to make. We want to be sure that our people are on a level playing ground and that they have that adequate and highly capable opportunity to bring themselves forward to be a part of life; and mostly, to do some good things for themselves and for their families and again for their community, as they so choose. And that's what United Tribes [Technical College] was about. We did officially, on September 6th, celebrate our 40th anniversary as an institution, as a school, as a training place that began in September of 1969. But the beginning of that goes back some years, back into the '60s, when a lot of us were ensconced with doing some fundamentals -- by us, I meant tribal leadership and tribal councils and other people.

I was just coming out of high school back in the mid-60s, but I remember listening to the TV at the boarding school that I was in South Dakota and watching TV. And the people of South Dakota had voted that day -- in I believe it was '65 or so -- and they voted that the tribes of South Dakota would continue to have their own civil and criminal jurisdiction. In North Dakota, something similar was happening. The tribes of North Dakota came together and they became United Tribes of North Dakota. In South Dakota, it was United Sioux Tribes of South Dakota and they were the remnants of the great Sioux Nation, by the way. But my point being is the tribes in many states, in many communities, were fighting for the fundamentals of civil and criminal jurisdiction. Jurisdictions that, yes, we continue to fight about even today -- in the courts and with all kinds of people and with the states and cities and counties and those kinds of governments versus our tribes and tribal governments, so that fight certainly isn't over -- but they laid the groundwork for those that were successful in retaining that civil and criminal jurisdiction in the mid-60s by having rejected Public Law 280 as a methodology for having the state to assume those jurisdictions; and that's what happened in North and South Dakota. And obviously, I capsulized this in a few brief statements because this was something that went on for years and years, and you know the origins of Public Law 280. My point being is they were at least successful in saving that fundamental of jurisdiction of the tribes, otherwise we would not have this -- and many of our tribes that went under 280 know the difficulties of being a 280 tribe -- because that was not our choice. It was put upon us by the U.S. government and then by the states themselves -- states that certainly didn't exist when we were long, long around, let's put it that way. We know that we predate all of these governments, including the U.S. Constitution.

So those were the formative years for places like United Tribes of North Dakota, but one of the lessons learned out of that success was, if we come together -- and in our region we have Arikara, we have Mandan, we have Hidatsa, we have Lakota and Dakota, and we have Chippewa, Ojibwe or Prairie Chippewa -- as sometimes they're referred to on the Northern Plains -- and all of those tribes had historic differences at various times, but you know all of those tribes also got along, long before the non-Native ever came around. And those are the stories that are not told. Those are the stories that are not told. And that's also an element of Honoring Nations: ways in which we come together in good ways, ways that we share and that we trade, and that's what Honoring Nations is about.

Sitting Bull is often portrayed as a great hostile -- a guy who hated everyone. That's not true. I'm a Hunkpapa, and our family and all of our people knew him as a humble, as a generous, and as an open man. One of the children he adopted, in fact, and raised was an Arikara -- a supposed enemy, by the way, archenemy of the Lakota or Sioux. So we knew and we knew how to get along in our own good ways when we needed to and when we wanted to. And so we didn't need the lessons of the non-Native, even today. And the lessons of Honoring Nations, I think, is an excellent way in which we begin to share effectively, effective ways in which we continue in rebuilding the renaissance of rebuilding tribal nations.

And that's in effect what United Tribes [Technical College] was about, because when they came together in those mid 60s -- saved, if you will, or preserved that civil and criminal jurisdiction -- one of the things they said, our tribal leaders said is, ‘We can produce other kinds of success by coming together in unity and in spirit.' And one of those results was United Tribe's educational technical center. They spotted an old fort in Bismarck, North Dakota called Fort Abraham Lincoln -- the second Fort Abraham Lincoln, by the way. The first Abraham Lincoln is to the west of us, just across the Missouri River in Bismarck, North Dakota. And that first Abraham Lincoln is in ruins and that's where Custer left for his final ride, I'll put it politely. So I'm over at the second Abraham Lincoln that was built between 1900 and 1910. And you'll see the parade grounds, the circular parade grounds, and the brick buildings and that sort of thing. For some people, it reminds them of old boarding schools, but it was a military fort. And they're what I call the cookie-cutter forts of the turn of the century, built from 1900-1910 or so, and that's when this one was built. And it produced soldiers for World War I. It went on and was used by the North Dakota Army Guard, by the way, up until 1939-1940, when INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] took it over and housed Japanese and German aliens there for five years. And then it was returned again to the North Dakota government. And in 1965, it was decommissioned completely and by 1968, we took it over. And that was again that lesson learned by United Tribes, by the United Tribes leaders and they said, ‘If we come together on issues, then why not do training?' We predate most of the tribal colleges, with the exception of Navajo Community College in 1968, but we actually were chartered in 1968, officially. And they said, ‘Let's get that fort,' one of our tribal leaders said and they did. And again, I simplify the story, but the point being is it was a good example of the Indians taking over the fort, but this time for peaceful and educational purposes and for our own wellbeing and on our own terms and conditions. So those are things that we keep in mind as we build and rebuild and we put things back together -- that our critical purpose is not only to preserve and protect, but to build. And again, I go back to what Honoring Nations stands for and what the kinds of lessons are that you provide for all of us throughout Indian Country, for those people back there at home.

And I look at my own Standing Rock area -- in North and South Dakota, which is where I'm from -- and I look at the issues of poverty, I look at the issues of the high suicide rate, some of the highest suicide rates in the nation, by the way. And I think of the story, of what Chief Lyons talked about at Wounded Knee in 1973 and going into that area at that time, about that same period of time. And what we were committed to was building and rebuilding our own educational systems, and we're still doing that. In 1973, there were six tribal colleges; today there are 37. In 1973, we were serving about 1,500, maybe 1,700 students nationally among those six schools, today we serve close to 30,000 students. Today 51 percent of our population or better across Indian Country is under the age of 25. And in many communities that 51 percent or better is under the age of 18 where you come from; we have a growing population. And so the challenge for us is to provide that quality education. The challenge for us is to provide even more, because our young people are hungry for the knowledge of who they are and what they're about. Yes, they need the skills. Yes, they need to be able to participate and actively compete, if you will, in areas of science, math and technology. I was just at a congressional panel yesterday in which we are beginning to develop our own engineering degrees on our own terms and conditions. [President] Joe McDonald out at Salish Kootenai [College] produced the first four-year engineering graduate this past May and we will do more. It starts in small ways.

But I remember in 1973 when a lot of people in D.C. -- where the Chief was -- said, ‘Why are you guys doing this? You can send your kids over to the local university, or whatever.' Well, local for us is anywhere from 50 to 150 miles away in our area of the country. The second thing is that mainstreams, only about 4 percent yet -- and this is a 30-year old statistic, by the way, that still stands -- only about 4 percent of our kids, our children that go through mainstream institutions, make it through with a four-year degree. That's a dismal shame upon America and upon American higher education, ladies and gentlemen. That's a shame. That's immoral that we have so few coming through the system getting and accomplishing degrees. So when I see an American Indian graduate with a two-year or a four-year degree, I tell you, I give them high commendations, I give them high commendations. And yes, there are great issues that they have to face even at that, but the point is we need more of these people. We need all of our trained and educated people back in our communities. And we face the risk of losing them every day to mainstream America because there are so many opportunities out there for them. And that is what nation building is all about, assuring that we have ways for these people to come back into the system. Too often, I hear young people say, ‘There's not a place for me to go back to,' either because the job doesn't exist or because there are certain kinds of politics back home. We need to teach our own tribal leaders -- and as leaders yourselves -- ways in which we welcome these people back, and ways in which we can have them come back into our communities, or ways in which they can continue to contribute -- whether they're in a national post, a regional post at even a mainstream institution -- because we are together and that is the way we continue and rebuild tribal America as I look at it.

And that's part of what really United Tribes [Technical College] is all about, that's part of what the tribal colleges are all about. But I mentioned in 1973 going into Pine Ridge -- myself with a crew of my staff, to do training among faculty, with Gerald One Feather, who had just completed his chairmanship, and Dick Wilson, of course, was chairman of the Oglalas at that time -- but going through roadblocks. On one end were -- Dick Wilson says, they often described them -- the GOONs [Guardians of the Oglala Nation]. So we turned around and went clear down the other way and went back into Nebraska and came back to the east side of that particular reserve. And then we ran into the AIM-ers [American Indian Movement]. So then we had to go back, come back through this way, double track and then go back through another road to get to what was then, the college. And the Oglala Lakota College -- which is now pretty much centrally located out of Kyle, but also has the rest of its centers, satellites, and all of the various communities throughout the Oglala Lakota area up there -- was pretty much in just what I would call broken down trailers and that's where they were teaching classes. But we went in and we talked to some of the staff and faculty and the president and did some work there. And then Gerald invited us out to his place just northwest of Pine Ridge. We managed to get over there late that afternoon into the evening and we had dinner with him. And we sat there and he was talking to us about what they were doing with the college and how things were going to go with it. We looked out of his windows there, his front windows, and they were all, there was no windows. We said, ‘What happened to your windows?' He said, ‘Well, they got shot out last night.'

But I guess my point is, we've had our war and this has happened in other communities as well, disparities. But what we have learned is we go on -- I'm not saying we aren't afflicted by them in negative ways -- but nevertheless we go on, because we're a strong people. We're a very strong, resilient people. We're a people that can accept and take change and incorporate it and do it in proactive ways. Otherwise we wouldn't be here, our children wouldn't be here, our grandchildren wouldn't be here -- given the size and makeup and complexity of our population, given the different languages that we have, the different customs that we have, from one nation to the other. As small and tiny as we are in this huge nation of 270, or more, million of the United States of America, we're still here and we will continue to be here. But the important thing is that we continue to build, as best as we can, and on our own terms and conditions. That's what tribal colleges are about: our own terms and conditions. They are the fundamental rights that go even before and beyond treaties.

Sitting Bull never signed a treaty, from where I'm from. He was a Hunkpapa Lakota, but as he said when he picked up that piece of earth and dropped it back to the ground, he said, ‘I never gave up or sold an ounce,' to be interpreted, by the way, of the earth, ‘because I am part of it. I've never given it up. No matter what they say. No matter what kind of piece of paper they put in front of me.' And yes, we have to adhere to things like treaties. And yes, it's important to assure that they're enforced, if you will. But he never signed a treaty. He fought his whole life and he gave his life telling people, ‘If you sign that, you sign your life away.' For him, that was what destiny was about and that was the loss of freedom. We're in a different era now, and even he recognized, though, that we had to make changes that were significant among ourselves, because he had gone on the Wild West Show with Buffalo Bill Cody and went clear across to Europe and been in D.C. One of the things -- he came back and he visited in a little school on Standing Rock, when it was settled, after he had been brought in, brought back from Canada and had been held in prison at Fort Randall for two years, brought back to Standing Rock and some of my own people followed him back up. They brought him back by riverboat up the Missouri and the rest of the people that were with him walked; they didn't ride on that boat. One of them was my grandmother, who was a little infant and brought up from that area of the country -- Fort Randall back up to Standing Rock. But he later visited that school where my grandmother was at, and it was called the Kennel Industrial School. It's not there anymore. In fact that whole community was inundated, flooded by the great dams that were put upon the Missouri River Basin from Montana clear down into Nebraska. But he walked in that school and he said -- and he talked to the children and he looked at all of them -- and he said, ‘You need to learn, you need to learn what the wasicus are doing and you need to learn how they write and what they do.' He said, ‘I can't read or write.' He could write his name, but he said, ‘You need to do these things and learn what they are about, because that is the only way you're going to protect yourself, it's the only way you're going to keep who you are.' He said, ‘I've seen them,' he said. He said, ‘They're going to come in such great numbers.' He said, ‘When you see the ant pile,' he said, ‘there are even more than that coming. They're not here yet, but they're coming. You see them around us right now.' He meant wasicus, the white man. He said, ‘They're bringing things that you can't see or understand all the time, but you must learn about them and you must learn their way, because otherwise you won't be able to take care of yourself.' He said, ‘I've seen them,' and he said, ‘there's more than you can ever imagine or think that are coming.' And he said, ‘It's something we cannot stop.' So even he knew at the end, just before the end, that there was a complete change in life. And he had his own school that was established in his community, just shortly before he was shot. So he was making changes himself.

But for other reasons, I won't get into the whole story about his killing, and how he was murdered, unfortunately, by other Native people. And these are the things -- and that is one of the first lessons we must always remember -- that the United States government has used effectively the Roman rule of ‘divide and conquer' very effectively among us. And we must always be cautious that we, as Native people, don't become continued victims of that, and that we don't use those non-Indian ways to take advantage of each other or to harm or hurt each other. Those are the realities. That was one of the lessons we should have learned out of the last Wounded Knee that Oren Lyons talked about a little bit ago. Because when we create those kinds of conflicts among ourselves, it also creates very harsh, bad realities, for generations to come, among ourselves. And then I can go back to the good lessons I hear and I listen to about what you are doing out in those communities -- of dealing with issues of disparity, turning them around and creating whole new kinds of opportunities, whole new kinds of wonderful hope and giving hope to others -- so that that student I talked to the other day may indeed be here at Harvard, but will continue on in a good way, carrying with him some good kinds of new proactive, if you will, weapons, but also ways that we continue to create peace and humanity among ourselves. Because that's where our hearts are, that's where our hearts are. They are good hearts. [Lakota Language]. Thank you very much."

Honoring Nations: Oren Lyons: Wounded Knee II: Honoring the Legacy of Ted Kennedy

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Onondaga Chief and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons shares a story about late U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy's crucial yet little-known role in averting an attack by the federal government on those who took over Wounded Knee in 1973.

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Lyons, Oren. "Wounded Knee II: Honoring the Legacy of Ted Kennedy." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project for American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 16-18, 2009. Presentation.

"I'm going to tell a little story about Ted Kennedy. Rick [Hill] and I come from a rough-and-tumble neighborhood and we grew up in rough-and-tumble times; we have thick skin. And sometimes these things occur. It's not badly intentioned, it's just the way we are.

Anyway, it was in the later part of the standoff at Wounded Knee and the Lakota Treaty Council along with [Frank] Fools Crow, Matthew King, [Frank] Kills Enemy, sent emissaries to the Onondaga Nation; they wanted help. And because we were a traditional system and we talk about peace, they came and they asked if we could help to bring peace to this fight at Wounded Knee. And so we did and we went out. I talked with Secretary of State [William] Rogers before I left. If you remember during that time, President [Richard] Nixon was in a hole -- he had disappeared; he was under tremendous pressure. And the White House was under [John] Erlichman and [H.R.] Halderman. Anyway, Secretary of State Rogers said, he said, ‘Lakotas shooting Lakotas is one thing.' He said, ‘Lakotas shooting Iroquois is another.' And I said, ‘Well, we're not there to be shooting at one another. We're there to try to bring peace.' And he said, ‘Well,' he said, ‘we are not in charge of what's going on out there.' He said, ‘We've sent government officials there and they've been put in jail by the FBI.' He said, ‘They're out of control.' He said, ‘We can't guarantee...' I said, ‘I'm not asking for a guarantee. I'm just telling you we're going out there and I don't want you shooting me.' So he said, ‘Well, talk to our new Bureau of Indian Affairs man at Lakota at Pine Ridge before you go in.' I said, ‘Oh, well.'

So we had a number of people at Wounded Knee. We had, I don't know, maybe 25-40. We had a lot of people there. And Indian nations across the country had not publicly supported that, but Six Nations did. We made a public statement and we said we are going out there and we did. Anyway, I won't go through all that what happened there and so forth, but when we returned...because there was the highest security of a war zone that they said they had ever seen. I was talking to the journalists; they couldn't get further than Pine Ridge, which was some miles away from Wounded Knee. Anyway, we returned and we had given our contact number. And we said, ‘We're going to try to get this information to Washington and we'll see, you tell us.' So we received a message coming from a woman who was really a leader out there, tough fighter woman. And she said, ‘They're moving troops in. They moved in the perimeter about 100 yards last night, which is about 300 yards, which makes the fire very lethal in moving 100 yards. And the fire becomes very lethal. There were heavy exchanges of gunfire out there. And one night I estimated, we estimated over 70,000 rounds coming in. It was a real fight. And anyway, they said they're moving and they're going to assault on Friday. The information we have they're going to assault on Friday and they're going to use gas.' And I saw the canisters when we went into Pine Ridge. I saw those big canisters. I said, ‘What are those things for?' and got no answer. But anyway, I knew they had the gas there.

So we called the Chiefs, the Six Nation Chiefs who were on alert to move and we said, ‘Well, we have an option here. We have either to go to Wounded Knee right now or to Washington to see if we can avert.' And we had to make up our mind. I said, ‘Well, since they're just putting everybody in jail that showed up over there, we'd probably wind up in jail right away and be of no use. So maybe we better go to Washington.' So they sent two of us down, Chief [Irving] Powless and myself. This was '73, [I was] a little bit younger and a little bit springier than I am right now. And they said, 'See if you can talk to somebody and set up meetings for us.' So we went and we could get nowhere, nowhere. Monday went by, Tuesday went by; every door was shut. Nobody wanted to talk to us and everybody was in a hole, nobody wanted to move down there. They were paralyzed; Washington was paralyzed.

It was Tuesday night and I said to Irv, I said, ‘We better call the Chiefs, tell them to come down. Maybe all of us can do something.' So we called them and they came in the next morning -- 16 chiefs, some as old as eighty -- my age right now. So anyway, we went and all day Wednesday. We finally broke through with a congressman from New York, Congressman Hadley. And he met with us. And I said, ‘Okay,' I said, ‘we need to get to somebody who can get to the White House who can stop this assault, which is planned for Friday.' And we couldn't. He said, ‘Okay.' He's says, ‘I'll give you [James] Abourezk.' And we went to  Abourezk . And curiously hostile, I don't know what it was, but our message was simply, ‘Look, we're not here to negotiate. We're here to tell you that they've cut off food supplies, which is against all of the rules of war. They're using starvation as a process.' And we went through, ‘These are 10 points we had.' And we said, ‘We're just here to tell you that on Friday there's a planned assault going in, and it's up to you to stop it. And when we leave here you'll be one that knows. And when Friday comes and the assault comes, we'll make it public that you knew and that's all we have to say.' And that was our message.

And we went around and we bounced off of Ted Kennedy's staff about three times. And then somewhere Thursday night, Thursday night -- we were tired, a lot of the old man. Luckily, it's an amazing thing; there was a young man who was driving a blue van. It had no windows. And he stopped and he said, ‘Where are you guys going?' We were going back and forth from the Senate to the House, Senate to the House. It's a long walk. I said, ‘Well, we're trying to do something about Wounded Knee.' He says, ‘Can I help you?' I said, ‘Yeah, give us a ride.' So he stayed with us all day moving us back and forth going to where we had to go. It was an amazing thing, helped us a lot because we had some old men there.

Anyway, Thursday night, we got a call from Kennedy's office. ‘I understand that you want to have a meeting.' ‘Yes, sir.' ‘Would you please come?' ‘Yes, sir.' And that was about 8 o'clock. So we went to his office and he had a beautiful office. He had the paneled walls -- big. And him and his staff were standing there, very formal. And so we drew ourselves up into a formal response. And he said, ‘What can I do for you?' We said, ‘Well, we're here to deliver a message. And the message is that tomorrow there's a planned assault on Wounded Knee,' and gave him our position. And he said, ‘You know,' he said, ‘I want you men to relax, sit down, have a seat, you've had a hard time.' He said, ‘Do you think you're hostile?' He said, ‘I just came from a Senate session where we have senators advocating a cavalry charge tomorrow.' He said, ‘I know what you're talking about.. I said, ‘Well,' I said, ‘all we have is the information, and it's confirmed.' And he said, ‘There's real hostility there, a cavalry charge [in] 1973.' And I said, ‘Well, we're here to see what we can do to stop it.' He picked up the phone, he said, ‘Have a seat, sit down.' And he called the White House, and I think it was Erlichman who picked up the phone. And he really, he really rendered a tirade that was memorable. And he said, ‘Don't you do it. If you do it,' he says, ‘we're going to have your ass.' And then he said, ‘I'm going to be on alert now,' and he finished his statement. And we looked at him, we thanked him. He said, ‘You men had anything to eat?' And we said, ‘Not yet.' He said, ‘It's pretty hard to get something around here this time of night.' He said, ‘But let me call and you guys go over.' And he says, ‘It's going to be on me.' So we had a big steak.

And that night I had to go. I had to leave that group and go on up to New York to try to do the same thing at the U.N. [United Nations]. And the men went home and we called back over there and told him, 'We think we've stopped it, but don't count on it,' because it was pretty bad out there. And as it turned out, it did stop the assault. And this past month, we were visiting [Washington, D.C.], we had planned to go over to Mr. Kennedy's office and hand him this letter of thank you. And it just so happened he couldn't make it there that day so he never received that letter. So we're going to send it to the family. But very few people know that. But when it was really needed and when we couldn't find maybe three or four friends on the [Capitol] Hill, he stood pretty tall. And we're ever grateful and to the whole family as a matter of fact. I think that if Robert Kennedy lived, he would have been the greatest advocate for Indians that this country would have ever seen [because] he was in that direction heavily. But that's the way it is. None of us are guaranteed to see sundown today. So that's the way life is. But I think you should know that this man has gone through a lot and anybody in public office catches hell, as you know. And I just wanted you to have that story about him. We'll make sure his family hears it, too. Thank you."

NNI Forum: Asset Building for Indian Country

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

The Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy (NNI) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona convened a panel of leading experts to discuss the fundamental obstacles standing in the way of asset building in Native communities, and the innovative strategies that Native nations, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and other organizations are deploying to overcome those challenges and build stronger futures for Native people.

The "Winds of Change" video is featured as part of this video resource with the permission of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Four Bands Community Fund.

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Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Asset Building for Indian Country" (roundtable forum). Native Nations Institute For Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. May 15, 2008. Interview.

Miriam Jorgensen (moderator): "Asset building refers to the process by which individuals and families build permanent economic independence. This is an area in which Indian Country is engaged in a more and more active conversation. So we’re here today. My name is Miriam Jorgensen. I’m the Director of Research for the Harvard Project in American Indian Economic Development and the Associate Director for Research of its sister institution the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona. I’m here with a team of great people to talk about exactly this topic, asset building in Indian country. I want to introduce to you the team. First I’ll turn to Elsie Meeks, who’s the President and CEO of the First Nations Oweesta Corporation and one of the pioneers of asset building in Indian Country. Next we have Elena Chavez Quezada, who’s a Policy Associate with the Aspen Institute which has long time engagement on asset building domestically in the United States and also internationally to bring us a more broad perspective from beyond Indian Country. Also Karen Edwards, who’s a Policy Consultant and also an Associate with the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. Again, a pioneering organization. Karen’s also a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and has been engaged in asset building in Indian Country for a long time. And finally I want to introduce to you Peter Morris, who’s the Director of Strategy and Partnerships for the National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center, which is another organization -- like the Native Nations Institute and First Nations Oweesta Corporation and the Center for Social Development and the Aspen Institute -- which is engaged in asset-building efforts in Indian Country both on the research and policy outreach front. And so we’ve got this fantastic panel of folks today to talk about asset building in Indian country and we want to just start off the conversation, I’ve given a very brief definition of asset building and I’m wondering if any of you want to just jump in and expand on that definition and also talk about why this conversation is so critical in Indian Country today."

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Elsie Meeks: "Well, I’m from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Oglala Lakota Nation, and Pine Ridge has been the poorest county in the nation, Shannon County, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, for decades, and yet I think because of my 20-plus years of working at Pine Ridge and across the country now, if we don’t start thinking about the opportunities that lead to permanent wealth creation, permanent economic independence, then we’re not going to change the way we are and it has to change, it really has to change. We have to come to a place where we aren’t reliant on the federal government, that we aren’t reliant on government at all and so the work that we’ve done at Pine Ridge and now nationally, we really, that’s where we want to end up, that’s our goal."

Peter Morris: "To me, probably more so than any other community in the United States and maybe in the world, Native Nations understand how important assets are and have been working on control of assets and being able to benefit from their assets as communities, and I think what asset building as a field outside of Indian Country has been talking about is kind of assets and the individual component of it and I think what the conversation in Indian Country has taken us to in the last five to ten years is a conversation that blends those two approaches and talks about the need for individuals to take responsibility for the economic self-sufficiency of themselves and their families, but to also do that within a community context. I think that’s often not thought about as we look outside of Indian country both domestically and internationally."

Karen Edwards: "Well, I just think asset building historically has been the purview of people who already have accumulated some wealth or are wealthy people. For many, many years the only people who were asset builders were people who had inherited wealth or somehow had made a fortune on their own. But low income and poor people weren’t really asset builders. They were cut out policy wise and there were many, many, many historical policy inequities. Most people build assets through the tax system so if you don’t have a considerable tax liability you really don’t have an advantage to build assets. The hope is that people who are poor or have low incomes won’t be left out of this whole new system of asset building that we’re seeing now. We’re talking about individual accounts for social security, we’re talking about individual accounts for college savings, individual accounts for retirement and what happens if people can’t benefit from the policies that are there to establish these individual accounts."

Miriam Jorgensen: "Karen, you’ve started us down a path that I wanted to spend quite a bit of time today talking about which is if a Native community or a Native Nation is interested in asset building, how does it go about doing it? How does it go about creating policy and creating opportunities for individuals and families in the community to really begin to undertake asset building? What are the components? What are the pieces?"

Elsie Meeks: "Well, if I might jump in here, it’s really…we have tribes that have considerable income, considerable resources, and some of them are actually dispersing per capitas to their tribal members, which doesn’t always create assets. We have poor tribes like mine that we have to figure out how we’re going to start down this road of developing assets. Or there are some tribes that have been really good at providing jobs. But even jobs don’t necessarily end up as assets. So it’s really about how do we get people to this point of creating wealth and that’s been kind of a word that hasn’t been used a lot in...Indian Country. So we have to start that conversation."

Elena Chavez Quezada: "I think what’s really, to build on that, we need to shift the conversation from a conversation about income to a conversation about wealth and I think income is about today, wealth is about tomorrow, and we can’t talk about wealth and assets without really talking about saving, and that’s why I think the financial education component is so critical, just to kind of establish that mindset that I am saving and sacrificing today for some goal tomorrow."

Elsie Meeks: "I don’t think the federal government ever meant for Native Americans to be economically independent and all the policies that they imposed on Indian Country were completely opposite of that, of us being independent. So it was really built on the more dependent we are the more the federal government controlled us. At this point, they don’t want us to be dependent anymore, and so we have to figure out how we’re going to reach that. In the past we always had resources that we managed and that we were self-sufficient, whether it was putting up food for the winter or just planning for the future. We always did that. I think that’s where we have to get back to is that we really control our own destinies and taking a place at the table means that we have, we build our own assets and our own economic self-sufficiency. And the way that a lot of tribes have done this is through home ownership. In the greater society or the outside society, outside Indian Country, the main way people built assets were through, they built it through home ownership, they built it through business, through various ways, and through investments and we have to figure out how we’re going to do that ourselves, how we translate that into Indian Country. There are many tribes that have done this and tribal members that have done this and been good at it. And so for the tribes that haven’t quite got there, the tools are there and so it’s through entrepreneurship, through savings programs, through home ownership, through education, all of these ways and the tools are there. And so I just think that we have to…it’s more in the messaging that we have to start talking about as tribal members, part of tribal communities, that we become economically independent and healthy societies. And I guess that’s really what the goal is."

Miriam Jorgensen: "So really a very important critical first step in moving there though is really changing the conversation so it’s a conversation that’s not about dependence, it’s a conversation about economic self-sufficiency for individuals, families and ultimately for communities and nations as well."

Elsie Meeks: "And that’s exactly right, and with the tribes that have considerable resources whether it’s through being really good at business or gaming or natural resources, they have sort of a jump start in some ways although the message has to be the same is that this income that they’re providing their tribal members has to create wealth. It can’t be just spent. But for poor tribes like ours, it’s the same conversation in some ways. It’s like, where do you start and it’s really…Elena commented on how financial education is really the key, and for us at Pine Ridge it’s really…there’s no resources available, hardly any jobs, but we still have to get people thinking about what’s the first step you can take towards figuring out how you’re going to become economically self-sufficiency and it’s maybe saving $20. There’s a program at Pine Ridge that has an IDA, individual development account, which will match their savings two to one. These are important programs cause not only are people saving money, but they’re also learning the skills for money management and that’s the first step."

Karen Edwards: "And I just think that’s an important thing to create are incentives that are meaningful to people at different income levels. There are many, many incentives for people at high income levels when you consider that 20 percent of the population has 80% of the wealth. There’s a lot of incentives up there for wealth building. There aren’t many incentives on the bottom which is why IDAs are an important incentive. It does actually give you an institutional framework in which to save and it gives you an incentive of a match to your savings and we have to be more creative about these incentives. The financial education is so key but also to be able to use that financial education is key. So people have to have a meaningful framework to build wealth in."

Miriam Jorgensen: "So can you give us some examples of some tribes that are doing some of this work that are either putting in place some very effective financial education programming or who are doing the match savings account programming with the incentives for savings? Are there some examples out there of good programs on these fronts so we get some of this real flavor of it happening?"

Elsie Meeks: "There are actually quite a number of tribes, there are Native communities that are doing this and Four Bands Community Fund is one of them. Their first building block really is financial education, the individual asset building and entrepreneur capacity building, youth entrepreneurship. It’s melding all of these things and actually that’s where that video should come in."

Miriam Jorgensen: "So I think at this point we’re going to pause and show a video of this very specific community application of financial education, matched savings account, and then also a wide variety of programs that are focused on asset building and really see how it works in the community and hear some statements from community members just to get more of this on-the-ground flavor of what we’re talking about."

“Winds of Change” video (produced by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops)

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Narrator: “South Dakota hill country, a majestic tapestry of earth and sky. The people who live here, the people who understand the natural wealth of their surroundings, have wonderful traditions of celebrating what they have. But this regal setting on the Great Plains conceals a sad reality. These people are among the poorest in America. Four bands of the Lakota people, as they are also called, today live on a reservation near the Cheyenne River. Seventy-five percent of them live in poverty. One-fifth live in deep poverty, unable to afford even the barest of necessities. It’s a place where the Catholic Campaign for Human Development has been hard at work.”

Veronica Valandra: “The greatest concern I see in the diocese is poverty because we have many Native people that don’t have homes, they don’t have any jobs, they need food for their families.”

Narrator: “The unemployment rate for men hovers around 64%. Only one of every three has a full-time job.”

Tanya Fiddler: “We have largely overcrowded households where 2-3 families [live] because of the lack of housing. The major employer on the reservation is the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe itself, but of those employed, 90% of them are still living below the poverty line.”

Narrator: “Tanya Fiddler oversees the Four Bands Community Fund, set up to spur business ownership and entrepreneurship among the Lakota people.”

Receptionist: “Four Bands Community Fund, this is Louise speaking. How may I help you?”

Tanya Fiddler: “We’ve made over 80 loans in the last four years. Our first year, the average loan size for a micro-loan was $1,000, and as the customer’s capacity has grown, the capacity to borrow more has grown. Our average loan size now is $10,000.”

Wynona Traversie: “‘This is our loan application.’ I love helping people, and seeing the look on their face when they come in and I tell them, ‘We’ve reviewed your loan application and you are eligible.’”

Narrator: “The Catholic Campaign for Human Development was on the ground floor with crucial start-up money, helping to establish a financial base for the community fund…”

Woman: “Savings needs to be a family effort.”

Narrator: “…and providing resources for business education classes called C.R.E.A.T.E.”

Wynona Traversie: “I’m just so happy for our entrepreneurs because they’ve struggled so hard.”

Narrator: “The Four Bands Community Fund is less about dollars and cents than about names and faces. It helped Gerald Davidson build his plumbing and heating business. It helped Eva Gilbert set up a hair and nail salon. It helped Mike Ducheneaux turn a fascination of cars into a full-fledged auto repair business.”

Blake Farley: “What kind of snow cone would you like?”

Narrator: “And even helped 11-year-old Blake Farley start his snow cone company. And it helped Cheryl Red Bear find economic vitality after suffering a series of strokes. Cheryl makes Native regalia and beautiful hand-sewn quilts. She took the Four Bands C.R.E.A.T.E. class, then turned her hobby into a livelihood.”

Cheryl Red Bear: I learned how to run a small business, learned how to budget, finance. ‘Hi Carly, I got your cape all finished.’ And it helped me out throughout the course. And it was great.”

Tanya Fiddler: “Cheryl Red Bear is one of our best homegrown customers. She was able to complete C.R.E.A.T.E. and, at that point, was able to ask for a micro-loan and an equity award from Four Bands.”

Narrator: “Sometimes, entrepreneurship requires thinking outside the box, or the house. In this case, the people of a remote reservation community called Bridger got together and came up with the idea of having tourists stay at a teepee bed and breakfast.”

Tanya Fiddler: “So they have this wonderful bed and breakfast. They have overnight teepee stays. One of the resulting businesses from the teepee bed and breakfast were trail rides. So we have a loan to the trail ride company. And we assist them to do their marketing and promotions so that they can build a package as a community, attracting customers to come in.”

Byron Buffalo: “It’s helped make me realize that, not to let anybody else define your reality, and to follow your dreams and make your dreams come true.”

Narrator: “But in today’s harsh reality, supporting even one’s immediate family, putting food on the table and a roof overhead, is nearly impossible for many of the Lakota people. Without work, there’s no paycheck; and without businesses, there are no jobs. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development strongly supports efforts like the Four Bands Community Fund precisely because it addresses the need at its source. It sows the seeds of economic stability and self-sufficiency. It promotes financial education and encourages the kind of responsible risk taking that may one day reverse the cycle of poverty on the Cheyenne River Reservation in these majestic hills of South Dakota.”

 

 

 

Elsie Meeks: "But there is really a number of tribes, and I think the conversation that tribes are starting to have around even if the tribal members get per capita payments from gaming or other natural resources how that really translates into permanent wealth and that’s really what it’s all about. Native people should have every right to have permanent wealth just like non-Native people should. But it’s really up to us to start providing the path to doing that."

Miriam Jorgensen: "And you’ve just said providing the path and I know that a really critical piece that’s of interest of a lot of this asset building work is focused on kids because people are saying, 'Look, if you don’t know that much about asset building and wealth building, financial education and savings by the time you’re older, a lot of it’s because you didn’t get that grounding and training when you were kids.' And Elena, you’ve done a lot of work through Aspen Institute in the U.S. broadly among largely non-Native populations and then some international work focused on kids' savings accounts, and I’m wondering if you and Peter together can talk a little bit about the children’s savings programming and some of the results and ideas that seem…really how to get people on this path so that we don’t get to a point, especially in some of the Native nations where we’ve got a lot of assets and a lot of potential opportunity for wealth building so that that isn’t reaching a situation of that being wasted, that we’re really getting people along that path toward it."

Elena Chavez Quezada: "This idea of children’s accounts is actually one that started here in the U.S. with Michael Sherraden at the Center for Social Development, and the U.K. has implemented it, and so it’s been up and running for about three years now and our proposal at the Aspen Institute is very much modeled off what’s happening in the U.K. But in that proposal, every single child born in the country receives a certificate or a voucher for an investment account at birth. And so the parents go and redeem that voucher at a participating financial institution and it’s endowed by the government. So the government has put in $500 for every single child born in that country and lower-income kids get an additional $500. These accounts are run through the private sector and the idea is they grow over 18 years and encourage families to contribute over time and at that point the child can or the young adult at that point can use those funds for whatever they feel is appropriate, whether that’s education or to buy a home or to buy a car or continue saving, and you’ve 18 years to kind of instill the financial education in that savings mentality. And because it’s universal, everybody’s doing it, so this is a really big cultural shift and those principles of this is in the private sector and we match it for low-income kids -- which is part of our proposal -- and that there’s unrestricted use at age 18 are really important."

Peter Morris: "The attractive element to me, and I was going to share this story as we were talking about what kind of concrete programs are going on and I think the Four Bands example is a good one, one story that I’ve shared with Elena and other colleagues at Aspen is the story of a young Navajo girl that I met and she had just completed an individual development account, matched savings account program, and I was sitting with the practitioner who ran that program and her over lunch and she was describing for me her life experience and how the process of saving just $500 over the process of two years to go to college, to go to Diné College, the community college there on the Navajo Nation. And the way she described it was that she was this quiet girl who wasn’t super engaged in things in the community and now she was on the student council at Diné College and she was super engaged and wanted to go to Arizona State [University] -- I guess there’s no accounting for taste -- to go to business school and she just had these grand visions for how she was going to start businesses on the reservation and she had this…she’d been given this vision and she said to me, and I’ll never forget what she said, 'If it wasn’t for this opportunity, then I’d be sitting on the couch watching TV with my cousins.' And the first thing that I see in child accounts is that opportunity and giving children -- no matter where they’re from, black, white, Hispanic, Native, Asian, from whatever background they are -- giving them that opportunity. And I think in Indian Country specifically, there’s two very key opportunities that we found compelling from the Aspen proposal and the first one is that it’s unrestricted use. So one of the great things about America is we hate regulation except when it applies to poor people and then we want lots of it. And a lot of the other proposals around children’s savings accounts talk about restrictions to uses that there are significant barriers to like home ownership in Indian country and going to college where you might need transportation that you don’t otherwise have. So it’s very important to me that we think about mechanisms that will really close the wealth gap between Native people and other people in the broader community and people of color broadly. So I think that’s an important thing for us to think about. Unrestricted uses is important. The other thing, and I’m sure Elsie will talk about this more as the conversation goes on, is it provides an incentive for financial institutions to come to Indian Country. So the fact that every Native kid at birth -- whether they’re in Gallup or on Pine Ridge or wherever it is --have a voucher that gets taken to a bank to open an account. When we have nine of ten of our Native communities lack a single financial institution within their borders, we need an incentive to get financial institutions to think about investing in Indian Country, and this isn’t the only way to do that, but it’s one way to do that, and I think this big idea at the national level to me really has a lot of legs as we think about how we can connect asset building in Indian Country with asset building beyond Indian Country."

Miriam Jorgensen: "Well, you’ve just hit to me what’s a really important barrier to asset building is just this lack of financial institutions because when I think about my contacts growing up in a small town in South Dakota, there were four different banks that I could go to even in a town of just 7,000 people and yet if you’re telling me that some huge percentage of folks in Indian Country don’t even have that opportunity, how is it that asset building can occur and some of these programs can really get off the ground?"

Elsie Meeks: "My organization has been really involved with helping Native communities start community development financial institutions. And these institutions generally start up in areas where banks really have not been able to lend. And so for instance 20 years ago we started the Lakota Fund at Pine Ridge, which was one of the first community development financial institutions. And after a couple years of lending there, we did a sort of survey of our borrowers and 75 percent of them had never had a checking or savings account which was really because…and 85 percent had never had a loan. It was because there were no institutions there. So one of the tribes we’re working with is the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota and the woman that’s running the community development financial institution there, and they’re doing financial education kind of across the reservation with the housing authority and also in the schools to reach the youth. And one of the programs they have is, they call it the day treatment program and it’s youth that are really at risk of dropping out of high school and they want to at least give them some financial management skills. So they were working with these kids and she was telling the story about Nodem was his name and he…she got him to set some short-term goals, which was pretty difficult 'cause he was a kid and it was like easy come, easy go, but his short-term goal was to buy some new shoes 'cause he had pretty holey shoes. And then the second goal was to set up a bank account and start a savings program. And she thought she didn’t have any effect on this at all and she said about three months after their program had ended she was in the bank and there was Nodem and he had new shoes and he had a job and he’d put some money in his savings account. So he’d actually opened a savings account at the bank. So it’s really getting people pointed down those paths which those opportunities really haven’t been available in Indian Country. So we were really rewarded by that one outcome."

Miriam Jorgensen: "That’s a great story. And it makes me think that most people here have similar stories to tell and I’ve also heard, and I want to give credit where credit is due with this, in an earlier conversation with Mike Roberts, who’s the President of the First Nations Development Institute and having a conversation with him about asset building in Indian Country and they’d been up to this again for 20 years at this point. And he said, 'One of our goals in all the work that we do is to look for these points of entry and to try to look for programs or opportunities where the individuals or the communities are ready to start some sort of asset building.' In the case that you have just told at Turtle Mountain, that opportunity sounds like it was to get financial education into this alternative school. In other cases, it’s to get children’s savings accounts going if the opportunity is there. Are there other critical intervention points or opportunities that are out there staring Native communities in the face, that tribal leaders, non-profits, communities can jump on to have these -- in a sense -- where the opportunities are and the folks are ready to move forward with them?"

Elsie Meeks: "Let me give one really good example -- and I hate to monopolize the conversation -- but at Pine Ridge, there is also...we started the Oglala Sioux Tribe Partnership for Housing and that was in 1998 and just prior to that there had been a study that showed that something like 70 percent of the people could have qualified for a mortgage of at least $65,000. But up to that point only four mortgages had ever been done on Pine Ridge. And then the partnership got started up and they had to deal with some of the security…securing the loans, perfecting mortgages because the land issues are very complex as you know and helping them with some down-payment assistance and this and that. But at this point in time, there’s been 40 some mortgages now created, so that was a real point of time where we said this can happen."

Peter Morris: "And for me, what Elsie’s just saying refers to two key principles in terms of thinking about, 'What are the entry points?' I think one is institutions and Elsie and the work that First Nations Oweesta Corporation does is a key part of that, is to build credible institutions that can facilitate asset building, facilitate access to opportunities. And I think it’s really important for us to think about asset building as almost a rebuilding process so asset building prior to contact with Europeans coming over here and the federal government thinking that the IRA [Indian reorganization Act] was a good system of government and all these other kind of great policy innovations of the U.S. federal government but put tribes in a situation where they were behind and needing to revitalize and rebuild some of these institutions is one thing. And I think the other thing is removing barriers and so there are immense, and I referred to them, immense barriers in policy to acquiring assets. Where is the hardest place in the United States to own a home? It’s in Indian Country, when the title status process can take as long as five, six years and so really what asset building in Indian Country is, it’s an integrated strategy to open the way to opportunity through investing in institutions and I think removing barriers to those opportunities. And there are so many of them, so it’s not obviously an easy strategy, but I think what I heard there was opportunity is there for housing and institutions need to support it and also there needs to be a removal of barriers that are still fairly significant."

Karen Edwards: "I think expectation has to be there also. I don’t think poor people or low income people are expected to save money. For years they were actually penalized for saving money and still are in many cases. People who are disabled save money they lose. If they save for retirement or for college even, they lose their disability benefits. It’s still the case. Those types of disincentives to saving have to be removed. Michael, in his book Assets and the Poor, said that income feeds people’s stomachs but assets change their heads. And it’s true, it’s what I think is happening in low income communities. The minute the opportunity presents itself, the minute there’s an institutional structure, the minute expectations and access and there’s a secure way for them to save money, there was suspicion at first, especially with IDAs. It was considered a scam. They’re just trying to get my money. Once they figured out, hey, there actually is a structure that I can do this and get a home and start a business and get an education, then people began to actually utilize it and I think that’s going to continue to happen on a broader and broader scale but we do have to have policy structures in place and larger amounts of incentives to make that happen."

Miriam Jorgensen: "Well, it sounds like there are a number of things going on here. One is the attitude and just the belief that this can be different and we talked about this at the outset of just to have this notion of this is about wealth building and about economic independence not about economic dependence. There’s the set of institutional things in terms of building institutions like community development financial institutions. How many of those are there now in Indian Country?"

Elsie Meeks: "There’s 48 certified community development financial institutions."

Miriam Jorgensen: "And probably another 70 or 80 in the pipeline?"

Elsie Meeks: "Right, exactly."

Miriam Jorgensen: "Those sorts of institutions but also other points of institutional intervention and it really sounds like one of the ones that you have focused on is for instance housing authorities and housing programs as a point of intervention, maybe also small business development sorts of institutions in Indian Country, schools as an institution for intervention as well and other kinds of training sorts of programs. And then the third piece being the policy piece. You can add whatever you were going to add Peter, that’s fine."

Peter Morris: "I was going to add -- and I think it’s important -- often there’s a disconnect, and I think we need to be really clear about the relationship between the tribal government as the facilitator of these kinds of policies being implemented and the kind of community infrastructure, whether it’s a housing authority that’s the tribally designated housing entity or it’s a CDFI that’s related to the tribal government and needs a good relationship with it but is separate. Or whether it’s in situations like in Cherokee Nation. The oldest Native individual account program is run within a department of the tribal government, and so tribal governments are called up and sometimes it’s an unrealistic expectation 'cause there are so many different challenges that they’re facing as governments, but sometimes it’s the tribe who can invest and at least in the case of CDFIs incubate it. The other point that I wanted to make -- and I think maybe Elsie you want to talk about this some more -- my sense is watching the CDFI field grow has been a remarkable thing and each time I hear you talk about CDFIs, I hear a different number because we’re seeing more and more certified CDFIs. What’s your sense of where the growth is going?"

Elsie Meeks: "I think tribes are really beginning to understand that by building the capacity of their individual tribal members because in the past it’s really been the focus on economic development has been really building tribal enterprises, tribal businesses. And I think that they really understand now that the more we focus on building tribal community members, tribal citizens, then that’s going to get us to this place of, that the tribal membership is really contributing to the economy instead of taking away from the economy, and that’s really important. So I think they’re really realizing that community development financial institutions are the vehicle to do that, that it’s through home ownership that helps to build wealth, build assets, or through entrepreneurship, which not only supports the individual entrepreneur and their family but also provides employment, starts creating a tax base for that tribe and through savings programs. So it really gets people to this place of, that we have an interactive, vibrant economy. Let me just give you a really quick example of this is so we start a business community development institution, community development financial institution, so we’re allowing people to get into business. So most people on a reservation haven’t been in business before, maybe haven’t even worked in one before. So they come in the door and they’re never turned away, but they’re sort of given an assessment about where are you at financially. They do a credit report, they find out their credit’s really ba,d so they get them in this credit counseling so that they start to rebuild their credit. They get them into an individual savings account so that they’re starting to save, to put away a little bit of money and in the process learning some things about money management. They’re correcting their credit, they’re starting to build their credit, then they start in an entrepreneurship program so that they learn that they maybe aren’t quite at this point where they can be in business but what’s the path to get them there. And then over time they say, 'Well, we really want to be in this business,' or maybe they say, 'I think I should go get a job for awhile.' But whatever it is, it leads them down this path towards some economic independence. This just hasn’t been done in Indian Country, really. I grew up at Pine Ridge, and I know that this sort of thinking and now that I’ve had this wonderful opportunity to work nationally, this is a whole new realm and it’s great. It’s really where we have to head."

Peter Morris: "And to me, it’s about pathways to choices, and so my sense is we talk about dependence negatively when people make negative choices because of dependence. But dependence in a broad sense is not bad, and in fact in society none of us is self-sufficient in the broad sense and each of us depend on policies that facilitate good choices that we make. So we think about college savings plans for our kids, we think about the home mortgage deduction that 70 some percent of Americans depend on to build assets, to build wealth, and we need to think about some of these policies and structures within Native communities that can encourage those positive decisions. So dependence in a kind of interdependent mutual responsibility kind of way is a very positive thing, and we don’t really want people to be self-sufficient in the strictest definition of that word, we want them to have encouragement and structures that promote good choices and help them get there so that they have the skills and the information that they need to make good decisions."

Miriam Jorgensen: "One of the things that I’m really curious about is we’ve talked about all these opportunities is the role of various parties and Peter you began to touch on this a little bit ago that it doesn’t all have to be tribal government, sometimes it can be. What are the various roles of various parties in the community? Whose job is it to help incentivize some of these programs and who can actually take up the challenge to do some of this work?"

Karen Edwards: "Iwas just going to say that I think what I’ve seen in tribal communities and some of the asset-building programs that have been created, it really does mirror what happened in the broader mainstream communities as assets began to…asset programs began to take hold in the '90s, in the early to mid-90s, and I think in Native communities it maybe started in the mid-90s and began to take hold. I think it really does mirror what happened in the mainstream community and that is that asset building ended up being kind of a grassroots effort. Because nothing was happening at the bigger policy level, I think that community-based organizations on the ground kind of took this idea and ran with it, and I think that’s also happened in tribal communities. Many --either a tribal housing authority or a tribal non-profit -- kind of took this idea and said, 'We can do this in our community,' and I think one actual big entre point was the earned income tax credit. There’s been a lot of movement in the private foundation world to help Indian Country get vita sites in the earned income tax credit campaign started in Native communities and they began to see that some wealth can actually be generated here. We could have some money to put in savings programs. We could have some money that people could build up to do home ownership. And that’s very similar to what happened I think across the country. There has to be that…there has to be something, though. You can’t really make something out of nothing. There has to be something there to start with."

Elsie Meeks: "Let me say though that the 48 community development financial institutions, CDFIs, that have started to date, I would say at least 90 percent of them were actually initiated by the tribal government, which is really important 'cause the tribal government actually started it, maybe provided some resources and in almost all cases have then spun them off to be separate from the tribal government, which is good because government shouldn’t be making decisions about loans. But then once these CDFIs got started, then they really understood the need to implement these asset-building strategies. It wasn’t just about making loans. It’s really about building the capacity of the potential home owner or the potential business owner. So they had to start implementing these strategies so savings programs, financial education programs, even earned income tax credit outreach and doing vita sites, some way to reach out into the community and get people thinking about their future a little bit."

Miriam Jorgensen: "So in a sense, there’s that convergence of the grassroots desire and pressuring for the program, plus the institutional creation and spinning off by the government to really make this thing go forward."

Elena Chavez Quezada: "Hey, can I just take that even outside Indian Country. The Aspen Institute -- as a think tank that kind of works at the federal level, I think there’s a role for organizations like us as well to really highlight some of the great work being done in Indian Country. We are still struggling today to convince people that low-income people can save and that they want to save and that they will save given the right structures and incentives and opportunities. So I think there’s a lot to be learned from some of the examples going on and I think there’s really a role for us and for people working at the federal level to take a close look at what’s being done and some of the successes that are already happening."

Miriam Jorgensen: "That leads me to one of the last things I wanted to ask each of you which is if you could just point to one or, if you can’t choose one, two, some of the most exciting things about asset building that you’ve seen going on in Indian Country that you just want to highlight and make sure that people know about. We could just kind of...people could offer those around the table or whoever wants to volunteer to go first."

Peter Morris: "I’ll offer two 'cause you didn’t make me offer one. I think there are two things. I think the first one is this integration that we’ve just been talking about, the fact that because of the challenges in Indian Country, because of the fact that some of these institutions are non-existent, because some of these policies that facilitate asset building outside of Indian Country are predicated on assumptions that there’ll be a non-profit on every corner and a bank on every corner, the fact that these institutions are called upon to do so many different things and to meet so many different needs means that there’s a real integration and strategic approach to the communities that they’re dealing with, citizens as whole individuals rather than kind of participants in single programs. And I think that’s something that’s been offered to Indian Country partially by the fact that some of the federal funding for asset building back in the '90s was structured in excluding tribal governments from applying for the money and so a lot of innovation took place there. I think the other one which other folks are willing to, are welcome to build on, is the fact that -- and I don’t think we can talk about this enough -- there’s a lot of negative press around per capita distributions to tribal members, particularly young people with this amazing revelation which is not really amazing at all or a revelation, that 18-year-olds with a lot of money and very little skills to manage that money aren’t going to make the best choices. And I think what we have on the flip side of that is communities that are really investing in their citizens in a way that is very unique and jurisdictions that are the only jurisdictions in the nation and one of the few jurisdictions in the world that offer universal accounts to their kids with money that they can manage, money that’s going to be there for their future, and these are the kind of policy innovations that are dreamed of at the national level, and yet I think because there’s so much reticence to think about Indian Country and what Indian Country has to offer outside of Indian Country, we’re not thinking enough about that at the national policy level. So I think those are the two most exciting things for me about asset building in Indian Country."

Miriam Jorgensen: "Karen, put you on the spot."

Karen Edwards: "Well, I think of as an example CSD partnered with the Buder Center for American Indian Studies to do a study on EITC [earned income tax credit] outreach and EITC efforts in Native communities and the first study was…it took place in ten different communities all across the country. And we had a meeting, we brought the leaders of these EITC programs together and we asked them what they would want to use this research for in their own community and the one that really struck me was a woman from a reservation in Montana who said, 'The main thing I want to do is begin to show our neighboring communities that, you know what, we actually do earn money, we actually do have some economic power and some of this money is going into their community and we’re not just deadbeats. We actually do have an economy and potential for an economy.' And I think that’s the way that Indian communities are embracing this kind of concept. It all belongs under that same kind of umbrella of, 'We can do this, we did it for centuries, we can do this again and we can even play by the economic rules that are out there today.'"

Miriam Jorgensen: Elena."

Elena Chavez Quezada: "Well, Peter kind of…but I will say it again anyway. I think the fact that there’s already this existing platform for child trust funds is really unbelievable. So you have a bunch of converging things happening. You have this infrastructure that’s kind of already there and a lesson for federal policy as well, but you also have some revenues that can be targeted and you have financial people interested and excited about financial education and I think being able to connect all of these dots and figure out a way to really empower kids and give them an opportunity fund, there’s just enormous potential there."

Elsie Meeks: "Ihave to think about the way that federal policies have been and sort of the low-income housing that’s been created through HUD on the reservations and how a lot of times you see these really dilapidated houses, and yet through the Oglala Sioux Tribe Partnership for Housing, which is really promoting home ownership and allowing people to get mortgages for their own homes and really the sort of stark difference. The homes that are home ownership, that people own and have built themselves in some cases, were well kept, the yards are well kept and it’s really a very…it’s a big difference and it shows the pride that people have in owning something themselves and working towards that themselves. And so I think back…I think to that. And then I also think to one of the first loans that we made at the Lakota Fund, and actually I have it on a picture of a presentation in our sort of logo at the bottom or phrase, it’s 'Building Native Assets' and it really…I think it really depicts us as well as anything and it’s this guy, it was the first loan. He had a $10,000 loan to buy a belly dump gravel truck 'cause he had gotten the semi somehow or other, the tractor, and now he’s got a backhoe and a grater and all these things and you see him, these pictures of him in action and he has…he’s 8A certified, he’s bonded and he’s providing lots of employment. And so that’s really what...I see that and I think, yeah, that’s really what building Native assets is about."

Miriam Jorgensen: "Those are fabulous overall summaries of the kinds of things that asset building can do for a community and wonderful success stories as well, and I really appreciate this notion and I think that we really need to remind Indian Country of it, that there are great experiments and models and examples going on there that the rest of the world can learn from as well. Just in summary, to look back at the conversation we’ve been having, this has been about building permanent economic independence for individuals and families, that’s really what asset building means, and I think that as somebody who’s been interested in and engaged in and following economic develop in Indian Country for over 20 years, the thing to me that’s most exciting about this is that it’s not just turning to tribal government and saying, 'Whose responsibility is it for economic development in Indian Country?' It’s a way of saying, 'The responsibility is shared.' And by undertaking asset-building efforts, this is a way for citizens and families to really participate in the economic renaissance of Indian Country and there are just great examples of that happening and challenges ahead. And hopefully this roundtable discussion has provided leaders and students and community members with some more ideas about how to undertake asset building and inspire them to some of the kinds of changes that can take place in Indian Country as a result."

Native Nation Building TV: "Promoting Tribal Citizen Entrepreneurs"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Joan Timeche and Elsie Meeks examine the pivotal role that citizen entrepreneurs can play in a Native nation's overarching effort to achieve sustainable community and economic development. It looks at the many different ways that Native nation governments actively and passively hinder citizen entrepreneurship, and the innovative approaches some Native nations are taking to cultivate citizen-owned businesses.

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Promoting Tribal Citizen Entrepreneurs" (Episode 5). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

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

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[music]

Mary Kim Titla: "Often when the subject of economic development in Native communities comes up, people think first of businesses owned and operated by Native Nations themselves. But there is another important economic force at work on reservations: businesses owned and operated by Native entrepreneurs. Today's program examines the state of citizen entrepreneurship across Indian Country, including some common obstacles standing in the way of small businesses, as well as the importance of creating an environment for success. With me today to discuss small business development in Native communities are Elsie Meeks and Joan Timeche. Elsie Meeks, an enrolled citizen of the Oglala Lakota Tribe is Executive Director of First Nations Oweesta Corporation, a subsidiary of First Nations Development Institute. She also serves as Chair of the Lakota Fund, a small business development loan fund on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Joan Timeche, a citizen of the Hopi Tribe, is Assistant Director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. She also serves as a board member with the Tohono O'odham Economic Development Authority and the Hopi Tribe's Economic Development Corporation. Welcome and thanks for being with us today. Can you first talk about citizen entrepreneurship and what that really means?"

Elsie Meeks: "Currently, a lot of tribes themselves, the tribal government actually starts a business and runs it whereas in this case individual members of the tribe start their own businesses."

Mary Kim Titla: "And can you give some examples of that?"

Joan Timeche: "They range from very small to very large types of businesses. They are often what we call the underground economy that exists, the tailgaters, the people who sell food. These are people who are selling firewood, making tamales, all the way to the storefronts where you actually have a building, you have...maybe it's a gas station, maybe a video store, which is very common in rural, small communities. To ones -- as we're seeing our tribal economies become a little bit more sophisticated -- we're seeing things like individual owners, individual citizens who are building hotels and the bigger kinds of businesses that you find common...that are common in more of the metro areas."

Mary Kim Titla: "Really, this term 'entrepreneur' is something that we talk about today, but it really existed even before there were reservations. Can you explain that?"

Elsie Meeks: "Yeah, 'entrepreneur' is, for me, a term that means survival, that people figure out ways to survive. And we were always survivors, and we always made use of opportunities that were at hand. And today, that means we start our own businesses to figure out how we become self-sufficient. And so I think that really the concept -- we always were entrepreneurial-spirited. We may not have understood the principles of a formal business, but that's just the next step."

Mary Kim Titla: "So it's part of our traditions. But Joan, you say that, when we were talking earlier, that really this idea isn't common in all tribes."

Joan Timeche: "Yeah, I think the culture pays a lot of attention to whether or not an individual can be successful and whether it's acceptable within communities. There are cultures where it's more common, more acceptable for a community, and an individual maybe can't perhaps rise and although they may be a contributing member to the overall survival of the Nation or of that community, maybe perhaps it's not acceptable for him to go off and become -- in today's modern terms -- to become that business owner and accumulate personal wealth. So I think that plays a big difference. I believe that Elsie and I both come from communities and cultures where individual success is celebrated, we're taught to be self-sustaining members of the community. Across my reservation on Hopi, you'll see a lot of artisans, we have a lot of people who if they don't have a storefront, they have a portion of their living room that's dedicated to selling arts and crafts or whatever it may be that they're making. It varies across, but I know that there are tribes where that's not often the case, where they look to the chief, to the chair, to the government to be able to provide that kind of assistance and the services back out into the community. So I think culture plays a big role in determining whether entrepreneurship might be acceptable within a community."

Elsie Meeks: "But I think also -- culture aside -- I think some tribes have thought that economic development meant that they started their own business, and a lot of them haven't been successful even, and what's happened then is individuals have to find some way to make a living, so of course they start doing things like making and selling arts and crafts or selling goods or providing services. And so there is sometimes a tension between the tribe doing their business and the entrepreneur, and I can think of a lot of examples of where both have been done."

Mary Kim Titla: "What about just how critical these businesses are to helping their own communities thrive economically?"

Joan Timeche: "Well, for one thing, they provide a service or they can provide a product that is in demand at the local level. Another thing that they do -- which I think is very critical along the lines that Elsie was talking about -- is that it's no longer just the tribe that's doing the development. It also involves a greater number of people, because if you live in large communities like from where we both come from on expansive reservations, you know numbers count from one end of the reservation to the other, so it does that -- helps to keep the money on the reservation because as we all know...I think here in Arizona 80 cents of every dollar goes off the reservation. And so it's helping to keep that dollar to stay within the community."

Elsie Meeks: "Well, in particular at Pine Ridge, because we're very remote, and in truth the tribe has not done a good job at managing businesses...Businesses in my experience can't be run from a political viewpoint. They have to be run as a business. And I think we found that out in the Soviet Union. The whole economy failed because of the government being the one that ran the businesses. And so at Pine Ridge, really not one single [tribally owned] business has succeeded except the casino, and so individuals are the ones that are starting this tire repair shop or grocery store. Instead, before we were running a hundred miles to Rapid City and so it was very not efficient, it really got into our pocketbooks having to go outside. And so as you create one business and then another then you're keeping that flow of dollars in the community."

Joan Timeche: "And I think one other thing that we should probably add is that when tribes get into economic development, they're looking at job creation, jobs and dollars staying within the community, and this is what small businesses are good at, even if it's just a mom-and-pop store that's employing the husband and the wife -- that's two more jobs that have been created outside of federal dollars coming into the tribal government, transfer dollars. So I think that's the biggest asset to having a private sector within a reservation is the jobs that it can create over the long term."

Elsie Meeks: "Yeah, but I think there's also one other issue there that when the tribe creates a business and their main objective is to provide employment, we always hear our tribe at least saying, 'We have to do something to get jobs going.' You can provide a low-income job to an individual, but what does that really teach them? It may teach them how to work or whatever, but when you allow someone to get into business and manage their own business and reap the consequences for good decisions and for bad decisions, it teaches something about management and leadership and decision-making that just providing a low income job, which is what most of these businesses the tribes start do, that it really allows...I've seen people change completely at Pine Ridge when they had this ability to manage their own business, and that to me is the real key and the real reason why I believe that individual entrepreneurship, citizen entrepreneurship is the most important development tool we have at Pine Ridge."

Mary Kim Titla: "It's part of the American dream, right? Be your own boss, work for yourself and work hard at it. And of course, there's this whole learning process involved, and what we're talking about what's going on at Pine Ridge, this whole, in recent years anyway, this hotbed of small businesses and the development of that. Can you talk about what's been happening there and what do you think the key to success there has been?"

Elsie Meeks: "Well, in the first place it isn't so recent. We've been at this for 20 years at the Lakota Fund, and we really started with micro loans that allowed people to expand their businesses a little, buy more material for arts and crafts or buy a chain saw so they can cut firewood and sell to the Energy Assistance Program. So things like that is where it started, but as time has gone on and people have become more sophisticated about businesses and have sometimes failed, had to pay back loans when their business didn't work so well, but now they're at this point where they really are understanding. There's a group of people, enough, getting to be enough mass of people that understand that the only way they're going to make a living at Pine Ridge is to start their own business and for it to be successful, and that it's okay. I think that's a key thing, too, is that because there hadn't been a lot of businesses owned by tribal members, people really didn't know whether this was culturally appropriate or not, and I think people see now that we're all entrepreneurs and that if we can be successful, our families are going to be supported, too. So as a result of these 20 years, I don't think that there is, on Pine Ridge, I don't believe that there's not one non-Indian contractor for example on Pine Ridge, because they [the Oglala people] have understood that they can do this themselves."

Mary Kim Titla: "And Joan, you've worked with a lot of small businesses. Can you tell me about some of your experiences and what the trends have been lately?"

Joan Timeche: "It really builds self-esteem and self-confidence. I think that's one of the best outcomes out of individuals owning and operating their own business. Not only do they gain the management skills, but I've just seen, worked with individuals...I happened to be visiting the Warm Springs Reservation recently and we were looking at their small business development program and visited with a couple of entrepreneurs who had started their business underneath the program, and this young lady was a single mother and she had entered in the program and she was running a thrift shop and the pride that this woman had. Her business wasn't making millions and not even hundreds of dollars, but that pride that she had, that here she is an individual mother who can then contribute to her own family situation, to the children, and was providing a service within her community. It was just tremendous, and that's I think one other thing that I've been able to see out there. But some of the trends that we've been seeing as we've talked about is -- and Elsie eluded to them already -- you've gone from those who are doing it on a part-time basis who then decide that, 'I can do this, I can really do this, and maybe I need to expand beyond my living room, beyond my garage. Maybe I can start moving out.' But there are risks that are taken in here and some people get burned and they pull back a little bit and then they try again."

Elsie Meeks: "But that's part of life."

Joan Timeche: "Yeah, it is all part of life. But they're moving forward. So we're seeing greater services, but there's still a lot of work to be done out there."

Mary Kim Titla: "So you learn from your mistakes."

Joan Timeche: "Yes."

Mary Kim Titla: "A lot of people who are entrepreneurs and are successful now had very humble beginnings at some point, right?"

Elsie Meeks: "The one thing that I think people...because I was with the Lakota Fund for so many years and they say, 'Well, how many people failed?' And to me, that was not really the cas. That no one failed. They talk about successful people across the nation. How many times were they in a failed business? I think it was something like three-and-a-half times or something on average, and so you learn from your mistakes and you keep moving. I can think of one man at Pine Ridge who -- his first loan with the Lakota Fund was to buy a belly dump gravel truck and he had the money somehow, he had already bought the semi tractor. And so he just started out hauling gravel for the housing authority or whoever and now, I think the last I heard he was...his gross revenue was like over $2 million, he'd become AA certified. So it's just a matter of process and a matter of learning and pursuing this."

Mary Kim Titla: "There are going to be people out there listening to this and watching this wondering, 'Okay, I want to become an entrepreneur.' What are some obstacles they're going to face? I know that the business plan is a very important part of that process and a lot of people maybe don't always think that through, but in your experiences what have you seen?"

Elsie Meeks: "Well, because I was a lender at the Lakota Fund and I think I learned a lot about what really does create a failure and that is, it's management. And so the better you can be prepared to be committed to that business and learn from your mistakes. The business plan is important, but I myself started a business and I can tell you that the business plan is just a guess and it's once you get in business, businesses are about a thousand details and every detail you don't attend to costs you money. And so you have to be prepared to make as small a mistake as possible and dig deep every time. It just requires so much commitment. We've learned at the Lakota Fund that we actually have to know how committed that person is before we'll even give them a loan. The business plan -- almost any business there will work because there aren't many businesses. It's really in whether someone manages it well enough to make it work."

Mary Kim Titla: "And if they have a passion for it. They have to believe in what they're doing. Otherwise how are you going to convince potential clients, right?"

Elsie Meeks: "Right. And I don't want to hog the conversation, but I know when we first started the Lakota Fund, because people hadn't even had a chance to work in a business let alone run one, is people's concept of business was really, 'Oh, I can work for myself so I can work whatever hours I want, yeah, I'll have cash in my pocket.'"

Mary Kim Titla: "Flexibility, yeah."

Elsie Meeks: "That's right, and there isn't any flexibility and there isn't a lot of money. In fact some people would get out of business saying, 'I have more free time at a job than I do at a business and I make more money,' and that's especially true in the first three to five years. So it's helping to teach people those concepts and those principles that business isn't easy, it's just something that, it can get you, it can help you be self-sufficient and some people really do like working for themselves."

Joan Timeche: "I worked for eight years or actually ten years at Northern Arizona University, and I ran the Center for American Indian Economic Development there and one of my jobs was to help tribal citizens who were thinking about starting a business go through that whole process of -- basically I was a technical assistance provider, helping them -- matching them up with potential loans or banks who might be able to lend to them. Well, what I found was that people, one, didn't fully understand what it was that they were getting into, so you have to do this education process about, 'Are you really, do you really understand what starting a business means?' But the other was understanding the tribal political environment and the tribal processes. Where do you go to start? And if you live in communities where it's decentralized and the power's at the local level -- like on Hopi, on Navajo, on Tohono O'odham, and I would imagine on Oglala Reservation as well -- you have local controls and approvals that you have to go through. If you have clan systems like in my community, we have clan holdings so now we have to get approval from our clan matriarchs and patriarchs, we've got to go to our village, before the tribal government even comes into play. So processes is one, understanding that and if you have...I know of one tribe in Arizona that has more than 100 steps to even start a business and it takes, it was taking my clients an average of two years. You could get through in one year but an average was about two years to even start a business and that just is outrageous. Then the other thing, the obstacle that they had to overcome was securing a land base, particularly if they were going to start a storefront [business]. And this is why people opt to go to doing the vending type of businesses where it's mobile and you don't have to worry about land base. Well, again, if you come from traditional families like I do, we have clans to go through first again. Navajo, it's chapters, on Tohono O'odham, it's district approvals and all of the land is tied up and very few communities have land-use plans in existence. They practiced it traditionally, but they don't have it on paper, which is now required for all of the right-of-ways that you have to get for electrical, infrastructure and all that. Then the next problem they had was, well, we're on raw land in many cases, so then you have the infrastructure issues to have to deal with, which can double the cost of starting a business. Those are just some of the basic obstacles that I think entrepreneurs have to face on the reservations. Then when they get to the loans, then they're on federal trust land and you can't encumber the loan, your area, you can't leverage it."

Elsie Meeks: "Which is, I think, almost on any reservation, land will be probably the number-one obstacle, but the next I think is financing because a lot of the people that we work with at Pine Ridge -- and First Nations Oweesta Corporation is now helping 70-plus tribes start organizations like the Lakota Fund to allow entrepreneurs to get financing. You can't finance someone if they don't have the experience in a business, and so that's where community development financial institutions like the Lakota Fund had come about, is that they're willing to take that risk. But financing is the second key issue for an entrepreneur and then these policy issues around land. So at Pine Ridge we actually, we've had 20 years at this now to kind of solve some problems or at least understand the process for solving them, is how do you build that capacity with the entrepreneur? And we started Wawokiye Business Institute, which is really client-centered. It just focuses completely on the entrepreneur and Oglala Lakota College has been a partner in that. And then they started the Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce, which try to work with the tribe in dealing with some of these land issues and some other tribal policies and then the Lakota Fund for the financing. So it's, I think, looking at it in a sort of systematic way and that's what we've begun to do at Pine Ridge. After 20 years, I think we've finally figured this out a little bit. But the obstacles are hard to get through and it takes a lot of effort from a lot of people and I think entrepreneurship really is in the beginning stages."

Mary Kim Titla: "You really have to persevere. I guess you could look at it as an outsider. It's very unique in that there are a lot of similar situations to a non-Native trying to start a business, but you have also unique circumstances that you have to deal with. So I appreciate you sharing all of that. You talked about as long as a year to two years starting a business on a reservation. But really tribal governments want to see you succeed, right? So why don't we talk about that a little bit, what some tribal governments are doing to try to help private citizens become successful."

Joan Timeche: "What we're beginning to see and hear a lot more about are tribes who've taken this two-pronged approach to development. One, where it's not just a -- Elsie talked about this earlier -- where it's tribal enterprises that are owned and operated by the nation itself and then there's private sector development, citizen entrepreneurship. But it requires some things, things like making sure you have sensible regulation, even having a standard process, a basic process of, if you want to start a business on our reservation, here are the steps, here's where you start at, here are some forms you need to know about, here are the rules within which you have to learn. We have a code that addresses maybe signage. We have a code that addresses land use and the process and so on, codes there and making sure that they have a uniform commercial code in existence. There are very few nations across the country that have that, because then it levels that playing ground for outside investors to be able to come in to help finance. If you don't have your own local CDFI [community development financial institution], then you're going to look to outside investors. Things like making sure infrastructure is addressed as well. And again because that's an insurmountable cost that has to be borne by an individual, sometimes it's a whole lot easier if the nation itself can -- in its land use plan -- set aside pieces of property that can be designated for commercial development, and then it's easy for the government to go after those grants to then build the water, the wastewater, the electrical, all of those things, even to do the paving of it and so on, and so all they're doing is then leasing out space to individual entrepreneurs."

Elsie Meeks: "When the Lakota Fund was started, we weren't started by the tribe. We were started by a group of tribal members, tribal citizens. But now there are a number of tribes that have actually helped to form these community development financial institutions like Cheyenne River in South Dakota, Gila River is working on this in Arizona. At Cheyenne River, they funded that to get that started, they provided the funding, but then they spun it off as an independent entity, because financing entities really need to be independent from the tribal government so they can be free to make good loan decisions and all of that and bring in outside money. So there's a number of tribes that are now seeing entrepreneurship as an important tool in economic development, that they don't have to do it all, that individuals can play a role."

Joan Timeche: "There's one other thing, too, that I think is real critical as your tribes begin to get into development at the private sector and it's making sure that you have this efficient and effective dispute resolution mechanism in place, whether it's through traditional courts or through a formal court or whatever, because there are surely going to be more business types of court decisions that have to be made or disputes that have to be addressed and you don't want to always be in court all of the time. So there has to be a mechanism in place and that's something that the government can help set up and create, to create this conducive environment."

Elsie Meeks: "And many of the tribes' court systems really are not efficient and they're not separated from the executive board or whatever. And at Pine Ridge that's true. There are plenty of obstacles at Pine Ridge. Entrepreneurs find a way to deal with that usually but I do think -- through all the businesses that are getting started -- they see now that the tribal court system isn't adequate and so now they're really at this point where they're starting to address that and talk to the judicial committee about that. And it hasn't changed yet, but I absolutely think it will over time and it's because of these businesses and the effect that the current system has on their businesses. So I think it's had a real good practical outcome."

Mary Kim Titla: "And creating a business environment is really crucial I think to the success of entrepreneurship on Indian reservations. I know that at least on the San Carlos [Apache] Reservation, the tribe built a strip mall with the idea of private individuals coming in to lease these spaces, office spaces or retail spaces, which I thought was very smart because a lot of people...just starting up a business is hard enough and then to have to create and build your own building makes it, I think, even more challenging. So I think that with tribes trying to do that more helps that whole positive environment. Are you seeing that more?"

Elsie Meeks: "Yes, absolutely. And the businesses at Pine Ridge helped to start the Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce as I said. To date when we start a business, we lease a piece of ground, we put the water and sewer on it and build the building, even though the tribe may own the piece of ground. So over the last few years, there's been a lot of businesses start on tribal ground and the tribe decided it was time to look at what their commercial rates were, which was fine except that they based it on something that was totally on a per-square[-foot] lease rate in Rapid City and it was totally...it would raise people's rates 1,500 percent or something, and because these businesses, through the Chamber of Commerce then went to work and lobbied their council members, when it came to the council floor, the council members got up and said, 'This is really anti-business.' And so that was just a wonderful outcome of the businesses themselves making, addressing some of those barriers."

Mary Kim Titla: "We really appreciate you joining us today. We've gone through some I think wonderful examples of what's out there and given a little bit of advice and some tips to people who might be wanting to start their own businesses. Thank you so much for being with us today, appreciate again your being here and your thoughts. I'm sure that it was helpful to a lot of people who are listening. Elsie Meeks and Joan Timeche, I'd like to thank you once again for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building. Native Nation Building is a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed on today's program, please visit the Native Nation's Institute's website at www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building." 

Indian Country must put more effort in public relations

Producer
Indianz.com
Year

While sipping my morning coffee I began reading a White House document titled “2014 Native Youth Report.” As with every other tribal member, I am aware of the long-standing socio-economic quagmire we have been enduring.

The fact that we are still alive and well is short of miraculous and thought provoking. In this enclosed Lakota biosphere of ours, we have life fundamentals that should be public knowledge. However, we rely on outside entities to provide skewed numbers or statistics relevant to language, education, and population.

We have a severe need to develop and establish our own data regarding areas of public concern. Such statistics will be local, accurate, and up-to-date...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Star Comes Out, Ivan F. "Indian Country must put more effort in public relations." Native Sun News. January 22, 2015. Opinion. (http://www.indianz.com/News/2015/016202.asp, accessed July 21, 2023)

Oglala Sioux Tribe to issue IDs at tournament

Year

For the first time in its history the Oglala Sioux Tribe will bring its enrollment office to the public.

During this year’s Lakota Nation Invitational in Rapid City the tribe will have a booth set up to issue tribal IDs to enrolled members who may not have the opportunity to travel to Pine Ridge to get them...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Ecoffey, Brandon. "Oglala Sioux Tribe to issue IDs at tournament." Native Sun News. November 25, 2014. Article. (http://indianz.com/News/2014/015762.asp, accessed November 25, 2014)

Teach youth about forms of government

Producer
Indianz.com
Year

Why aren’t the schools teaching about the IRA form of government? Why aren’t they teaching about the traditional tiospaye form of government?

The disenchantment and what appears to be apathy or even seditiousness toward the Indian Reorganization Act system of government have become “normal” among many voters in my home district. This voter consensus seems to come from the fact that they are continually reminded, via tribal council actions, of their powerlessness to correct government. It is annoying to know that this problem afflicting us here on the Pine Ridge, voters and leaders alike, rises out of the fact that not one individual living today received formal schooling on this system of government under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). It is also irritating to “see” the continuing unconcern among federal and tribal educators regarding this serious educational shortage...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Star Comes Out, Ivan. "Teach youth about forms of government." Native Sun News. July 17, 2014. Opinion. (http://www.indianz.com/News/2014/014426.asp, accessed February 4, 2024)

Glimmers of hope on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

Author
Producer
MSNBC
Year

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

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

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

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

As old ways faded on reservations, tribal power shifted

Author
Year

Long before the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act transformed tribal government, before nepotism and retaliation became plagues upon reservation life, there were nacas.

Headsmen, the Lakota and Dakota called them. Men designated from their tiospayes, or extended families, to represent their clans when they came together for larger tribal matters, such as where to hunt that year...

Resource Type
Citation

Young, Steve. "As old ways faded on reservations, tribal power shifted." Argus Leader. April 27, 2014. Article. (http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2014/04/27/old-ways-faded-reservat..., accessed March 3, 2023)

New economic hope on Pine Ridge Reservation

Year

When I read the Lakota Country Times I am heartened by the economic progress that oftentimes is hidden in the more alarming media reports of rampant alcoholism and the resulting horrors that the disease brings to the communities there on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

There is hope to be had in what is happening on the economic scene, and it’s mostly in the districts, in the villages, out of sight of visiting camera crews and reporters...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Trimble, Charles. "New economic hope on Pine Ridge Reservation." Indianz.com. February 18, 2014. Opinion. (http://www.indianz.com/News/2014/012559.asp, accessed February 18, 2014)