Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians

"Modern Tribal Governments, Constitutions, and Sovereignty" Session at NCAI's Annual Convention

Producer
National Congress on American Indians
Year

This session, convened by NCAI at its 2014 Annual Convention, chronicled the growing movement by tribal nations to reform and strengthen their constitutions in order to reflect and preserve their distinct cultures and ways of life, more effectively address their contemporary challenges, and achieve their long-term priorities. It shared the constitutional stories of four tribal nations who have either reformed their constitutions or currently are in the process of doing so.

The session includes 5 presentations from prominent Native nation leaders and scholars:

  1. Sherry Salway Black and Ian Record provide a brief overview of tribal constitutionalism and the current movement among tribal nations to engage in constitutional reform.
  2. John “Rocky” Barrett, longtime chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, shares how the Citizen Potawatomi Nation long struggled with an imposed system of governance and how it turned to constitutional reform to reshape and stabilize that system so that it is capable of helping the nation achieve its strategic priorities.
  3. Erma Vizenor, former Chairwoman of the White Earth Nation, provides a detailed history of White Earth’s Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) system of governance, and why and how White Earth decided to create an entirely new constitution in order to make its system of governance more culturally appropriate and functionally effective.
  4. Richard Luarkie, former Governor of the Pueblo of Laguna, offers a detailed chronology of the Pueblo’s constitutional and governmental odyssey over the past few centuries, and how the Pueblo is in the process of reforming its constitution to fully exercise its sovereignty and make its system of governance more culturally appropriate.
  5. Justin Beaulieu, Coordinator of the Constitution Reform Initiative for the Red Lake Nation, describes the process that Red Lake designed to engage Red Lake citizens about the nation’s current constitution and what they would like to see in a new constitution.

 

 

Resource Type
Citation

“Modern Tribal Governments, Constitutions and Sovereignty”. (October 2014). Presentation. National Congress on American Indians's Partnership for Tribal Governance. Atlanta, GA. Retreived from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBjQrzrj0Iyu5miLAFGEg9VS6BhS_JS58

Transcripts for all videos are available by request. Please email us: nni@arizona.edu.

Return of the Red Lake Walleye (Ogaag bii azhe giiwewag)

Author
Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

The Native Nations Institute's film "Return of the Red Lake Walleye" is a 30-minute documentary that tells a compelling story of tribal sovereignty in practice. It chronicles the extraordinary effort of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians -- working together with the State of Minnesota and the federal government -- to bring back the culturally vital walleye from the brink of extinction and restore it to health in Red Lake. It examines how the Band and State overcame decades of bad blood to forge an innovative public policy solution that puts cooperation before conflict and science before politics, fueling an amazing recovery that has defied the odds.

Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian (Director). (2010). Return of the Red Lake Walleye [film]. Native Nations Institute. Tucson, AZ.

Honoring Nations All-Stars Profile: The Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program

Year

In 1997, the members of the Red Lake Fisheries Association (RLFA), a cooperative established by com-mercial fishermen from the Red Lake Nation,1 voted to discontinue all commercial gillnet fishing on Red Lake for the upcoming season. An overwhelming majority of the RLFA’s members supported the decision, despite its direct impact on their livelihoods. Less than a year later, the Red Lake Tribal Council passed a resolution banning hook-and-line subsistence fishing for walleye, effectively ending all fishing on tribal waters. Hundreds of families lost income from the demise of commercial walleye fishing, and with the overall fishing ban, every tribal citizen lost access to a significant food source. But witnessing firsthand the stark decline of the walleye and recognizing that a vital cultural and economic resource was slipping away, the Red Lake Nation had taken a stand: it needed to do everything it could to save the walleye and make its iconic lake healthy again.

Resource Type
Citation

Dolan, Jamie; Ian Record; Miriam Jorgensen; and Eileen Briggs. "Honoring Nations All-Stars Profile: The Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program". Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2013.

Red Lake Walleye Recovery Project

Year

Clearly demonstrating that tribal nations not only have the ability to make large scale achievements in resource conservation, but that they can do so with unprecedented success, the Red Lake Walleye Fishery Recovery Project has brought the walleye fish population back from virtual extinction to an optimal level in less than a decade. Operating under a consensus arrangement with local and commercial fisherman, as well as state and federal officials, the Recovery Project now determines when, how, and who can fish the historic waters from which the Band claims their name.

Resource Type
Citation

"Red Lake Walleye Recovery Project." Honoring Nations: 2006 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007. Report.

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

We Are the Stewards: Indigenous-Led Fisheries Innovation in North America

Author
Year

This paper offers an overview of the current state of Indigenous-led fisheries management in the United States and Canada. It summarizes major trends in Indigenous-led fisheries innovation in North America and presents common keys and challenges to the success of these efforts. It chronicles three cases that demonstrate the ingenuity, resourcefulness, and tenacity of Native nations in exerting substantive management authority over the fisheries on which they have long depended.

While re-establishing and protecting Native nations’ rights to manage fisheries is critical, the question of what Native nations do with those rights, once regained, is also important.This paper suggests that internal institutional factors often play a critical role in Native nations’ efforts to develop, implement, and monitor innovations that advance their vision for sustainable fisheries. Finally, it provides other Indigenous peoples (in North America, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere) food for thought as they work to increase decision-making authority over fisheries, develop and sustain fish resources, and ensure the economic, physical, and cultural benefits of those resources.

Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian. "We Are the Stewards: Indigenous-Led Fisheries Innovation in North America." Joint Occasional Papers on Native Affairs No. 2008-01. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2008. JOPNA.

Floyd "Buck" Jourdain: Constitutional Reform and Leadership at the Red Lake Nation

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Floyd "Buck" Jourdain, Chairman of the Red Lake Nation from 2004 to 2014, discusses his nation's constitutional reform effort and the supporting role he played in helping to get the effort off of the ground. He also talks about how comprehensive constitutional reform will empower his nation's elected leaders to effectively tackle its biggest problems and identify and then achieve its strategic priorities. 

Resource Type
Citation

Jourdain, Floyd "Buck." "Constitutional Reform and Leadership at the Red Lake Nation." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Walker, Minnesota. July 9, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program, we are honored to have with us Floyd Jourdain, Jr., a citizen of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota. Floyd, otherwise known as ‘Buck,’ served as Red Lake Nation Chairman from 2004 to 2014. An advocate of Native culture and living drug and alcohol free, Jourdain has spent the past three decades working as a counselor, community organizer and educator. Buck, welcome and good to have you with us today.

Floyd Jourdain:

Miigwetch. Thank you.

Ian Record:

I’ve shared a little bit about who you are, but why don’t we start off by having you tell us a little bit more about yourself. What did I leave out?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, you didn’t leave out much I suppose. It’s a good nutshell there. I grew up on a reservation, Red Lake, northwestern Minnesota and was educated there, graduated from high school, went off to college for a couple years and got involved in chemical dependency and recovery programs, and working with youth and youth councils and those type of things. Started studying sociology and racism and trying to combat those type of social factors in Indian Country, and then somehow it led me to be the chief of the tribe. I don’t know how it happened, but it did and I was the chairman for 10 years.

Ian Record:

We’ll talk about that, your tenure as chairman a bit later. What I wanted to start off talking about though is constitutional reform. In August 2012, the Red Lake Nation approved a plan to review and revise its constitution. That’s an effort that’s still unfolding, it’s very early on in terms of its, in terms of the process. From your perspective what prompted the nation to go down the reform road?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, it’s been a topic of tribal elections every two and four years. You hear catch phrases like 'separation of powers,' 'constitutional reform,' and candidates never really elaborate on that or what it is and people are left with this big question mark. I think that finally somebody came along who said, ‘This is something that really needs attention.’ I think my background in studying political science had something to do with that and also the culture of the tribe and the history and the treaties and our government structure and how we’ve evolved over time. So leading up to it, it just fell right in step with some of the things I was interested as a tribal leader, so I was right from the early on get-go interested in pursuing that.

Ian Record:

So you were chairman at the time that this effort, this initiative was formally given the green light by the council. And I’m curious, what role did you play in your capacity as chairman in terms of getting this movement going, to getting this effort off the ground?

Floyd Jourdain:

That’s one of the advantages of being the chairman is you’re able to carry out some of the vision and some of the things that the people are wanting to see happen. Over my lifetime, I’ve seen some political train wrecks and tumultuous times that had to do with the constitution within our tribe and others and being able to instead of pointing planners in the direction of saying, ‘Well, hey, let’s get some immediate things going.’ No, let’s try to embark on something that’s long range and constitutional reform is one of those things. It was a priority when I came into office and actually before that I was dabbling and studying it and going to school studying political science and those type of things. So I was pretty excited about finding some people who were interested in taking that on and then just letting them go.

Ian Record:

You talked about finding some people and letting them go. From what I’m hearing, there was a sense of your own place and how the extent of your involvement could be perceived by certain folks. Did you have any sense that, ‘I need to be careful about just how fully I as the chairman, as the chief elected leader of this tribe, get involved in the reform of the nation’s constitution and government?’

Floyd Jourdain:

Indian Country can be so divisive, especially when it comes to politics and you have to be respectful of someone’s, what you perceive as a bad idea at one point was somebody’s good idea and to build something lasting. You don’t want to have your name tied to, directly to it. And I think empowerment is key by planting that seed, finding the right people to carry it out, support them, step back a ways and just kind of guide things from the peripheral -- if you’re allowed to do that -- because at some point you do more harm than good if you’re directly involved in especially major efforts that are going to be carrying on for quite some time regardless of who the political leaders are.

Ian Record:

Was part of your role being like a source of information for folks who were curious about what’s going with this, ‘Tell me more about this,’ and sort of giving them the 411 on what this constitutional reform initiative is all about and who is in charge of it and things like that?

Floyd Jourdain:

Yeah. Prior to coming to office people would come to me and say, ‘Well, what’s all of the big, what’s all the fighting about?’ And usually it was two political powerhouses fighting over who’s going to control the jobs and gaming and housing and who’s going to do the favors and control everything. And they would say, ‘Well, why are they doing it? How are they allowed to do that?’ And so a lot of the educating of like my family and friends and younger people, youth council, those people; so I was doing a lot of teaching back then about how governments work, in particular tribal governments because not only looking at tribal constitutions, but also the United States Constitution, European history and how all of those...American history affected us. Yeah, those, the education is a huge, huge piece of getting people to understand, ‘Why is there this dysfunction happening? There’s got to be a reason.’ So I’ve always been fascinated by prying and finding out why something happens or why it’s happening and not being satisfied just with that, but now what’s a good strategic way to do something about it?

Ian Record:

It sounds like you had a supportive role to play, you had an information-sharing role to play, also with a keen sense that you have to allow the people to take full ownership in the process. From what I know about the Red Lake constitution reform process, that seems to be the top priority: this has to be ultimately an expression of the people’s will and not, as you’ve sort of alluded to, to be assigned or attached to one political leader. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this sort of mindset that went into that?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, I can speak for my tribe when I can say the tribal chairman has always had a huge target on them and people come after the chairman, I don’t care who it is, and the same goes for a lot of other tribes as well. And so the chairman, if he gets behind something, a lot of times it’s, of course his supporters are going to say that’s a good thing, but then the other people are going to say, ‘Well, hey, this is something that we’re opposed to.’ You want to get as many people involved and empowered and be neutral and you’re exactly right, we just have to give it to the people and let the people take ownership of it and make it their own. The effort itself is, you basically cut the cord and watch it grow. And I think that’s a good thing because regardless of who the leader is, then the effort stays strong, it stays connected with the people, it has a grassroots feel to it and they will keep it moving. It takes on a life of its own and I think that’s a very, very strong way to go about approaching government reform.

Ian Record:

So can you describe in a nutshell the approach that Red Lake, the structure it created to shepherd this reform movement along, sort of at a macro level?

Floyd Jourdain:

The structure, well, we were hoping to,  I’ve seen like piecemeal efforts in the past to do constitutional reform and usually it’s the people in power will fix a little piece or this or that that’s going to work to their benefit and people were like, ‘Well, what was that all about?’ and it was never fully explained. So by putting together a team of people who are able to have this fervor and this interest and this energy to go after this and not only educate themselves on it, but to go out directly into the community in a strategic, planned out, chronological order, that’s been really effective. And starting with education: ‘What is constitutional reform? Why are we doing it? What is, I’ve heard about it, but I really don’t understand a lot about it.’ I think finding the right team and the right people and just letting them do their thing has been a good approach.

Ian Record:

Isn’t part of that challenge of getting the people engaged, you mentioned making them understand what constitutional reform is, but isn’t there a piece prior to that where you’re actually trying to make the argument, ‘Here’s why the constitution matters to you as a citizen of this nation,’ or, ‘here’s how revisiting and strengthening it can actually improve your life and the life of those yet to come’?

Floyd Jourdain:

Yeah, I believe so. Just basic rudimentary government. A lot of this new generation coming up, some of them have had a misperception that we’re really steeped in tradition and language and we’re carrying on a tradition that has been there for hundreds of years when actually we’ve recreated a template of somebody else’s stuff that has very little to do with our tribe at all -- our identity, our language, our philosophies and our culture and any of that. So I think that’s where a lot of it starts is that people just don’t have any idea. And elections are, I see it as an opportunity to educate people because people will go out there and they’ll say, ‘We need a separation of powers and we need term limits and we need this and we need that.’ And then people are scratching their heads, ‘Is this a bad thing or why are we, ?’ So I think it’s really important to, again I can’t emphasize enough with youth councils, high schools and alternative schools and charter schools to educate at that level. Because in Indian Country I didn’t read anything about any of this stuff until I was like two years into college and on most reservation schools you have public schools or you have BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] schools; they don’t teach this stuff. We don’t know anything about it until we get a little older, but what’s encouraging is the next generation coming up, you see they’re more advanced in their thinking, they’re learning about federal Indian law and they’re fascinated by language revitalization. They’re educated at a whole other level now with social media and access to technology. It’s pretty fascinating digging through card catalogs to find out about the Marshall Trilogy and you’re two years into college. Now these young people on youth councils and they’re saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this thing going on on federal Indian law, would you be interested in coming to speak?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ Whoa, I wish I would have had that when I was younger because there was no such thing."

Ian Record:

Card catalogs. We’ll have to explain to our younger viewers what that is.

Floyd Jourdain:

Yeah, it was cumbersome and a lot of work.

Ian Record:

You’ve alluded to this and I want to talk a bit more about it, but in the vision statement for the Red Lake constitutional reform initiative -- which is overseen by a reform committee that represents a broad cross section of people in your community -- but the vision statement for this initiative and for this basically the charge of the committee is in part to strengthen the ideas of self-governance in its constitution. Can you talk a little bit more about that, about how the current constitution doesn’t truly and perhaps fully enact notions of self-governance and in particular Anishinaabe Ojibwe self-governance?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think self-governance is inclusive of the people and that’s one of the things that’s been lacking. Elected officials --again I can speak for our tribe -- have no job descriptions. Nobody knows what they do. They’re not required to really do anything. You get on the tribal council, you’re elected to that position and there’s a misconception of what the role of a tribal leader should be. So basically we’re saying, ‘You write our job description for us. What are your ideas, what is your vision, what do you think a tribal leader should do? Is it to control all the housing and the jobs and bring all their political people in and do this and that and do favors and comps and all this kind of stuff?’ No, that’s not what a tribal leader is supposed to be doing. ‘Well, it doesn’t say they’re not supposed to be doing that.’

So in our particular situation, there’s job descriptions for the three executive officers: the chairman, the secretary and the treasurer, but the representatives, nothing. There’s nothing in there that says what the chiefs are supposed to be doing. There’s no criteria, there’s no qualifications that they’re supposed to have, there’s no code of conduct, ethics, no bill of rights and under that particular arrangement the people are detached from government; there is no empowerment. And I think with constitutional reform, it’s going to allow people to say, ‘These are the expectations of our nation. We expect better. We expect a higher level of representation. We expect to raise the standards of our tribe and what our nation is aspiring to be.’ And with a lack of that, you can do anything. You have these elections every two and four years, there’s a lot of upheaval, there’s no accountability. You have people perpetuating a system that is...basically contributes to sometimes, unfortunately, chaos and a loss of any potential and progress. So I think those are important. You just call it what it is.

When you start to point those things out, people will [say], ‘I had no idea. I thought a tribal council member was supposed to be the director of our gaming,’ or, ‘I thought they were supposed to oversee. I thought we could go to them and get money from them and those kind of things.’ So minus that, you get these people who are, they become almost in a sense sometimes enablers and they perpetuate it after awhile. I don’t know if it’s a sense of, ‘People are relying on me, they’re dependent of me, they need me,’ and next thing you know you lose focus. Our nation needs leaders and our job is to be, set the direction of the tribe, the vision to move our nation forward and be forward thinking. We’re supposed to be looking over here, not just right here and I think that that’s a huge part of constitutional reform is, ‘What are these leaders doing? They get bogged down in all these other things and what about us?’

I ran for office and I was a younger person and there was a lot of squabbling and fighting and the constitution was, ‘Oh, well, this person here is doing this and that one, we’ve got to have a recall and we’ve got to get this one out of here and we’ve got to, ’ and there was a lot of finger pointing back and forth and anger and emotions and tempers flaring and people marching around with petitions and all this kind of stuff and people were like, ‘This is crazy. What’s going on?’ Meanwhile, we had youth suicides and crack cocaine was infiltrating Indian Country, enormous, ridiculous amounts of diabetes with youth and juveniles and chemical dependency issues and joblessness and homelessness. But then you have all of these people fighting over, citing the constitution. ‘They’re not doing this, they’re not doing that, according to the constitution.’

So those are things that I think will contribute greatly to healthier communities, to more effective leadership, better education, better systems and it’s a huge, huge undertaking, but it’s one that has to be approached in a manner where you can just continually pass the torch, pass the torch, pass the torch. Sometimes it might take generations. It’s nothing something I don’t think that will happen really fast, but it’s something that definitely is happening now.

Ian Record:

So in this process of redefining self-governance and what that means and people are taking a full participatory role in that redefining process, how valuable is it for -- and it sounds like this is what the Red Lake constitution reform committee is getting the people to really focus on -- but how valuable is it for people to go back and realize and investigate that, ‘Hey, we as Red Lake, we had this self-governance thing figured out a long time ago. In fact, that’s the reason why we’re still here and maybe if we more fully examine the key principles that served as the foundation of that traditional governance system, there’s things that we can bring forward and make it more ours, make it more Anishinaabe.’ Is that a current you’re starting to see taking root within the community as sort of a topic of conversation?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think it is, because incorporating the language and culture into tribal courts, into tribal leadership, into education and melding that into a governmental instrument that’s effective for everybody is something that’s going to be, greatly enhance the quality of life for everybody. And the Anishinaabe philosophies and those principles and ways of living, they were minus a lot of the, how do I say, suppose ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and ‘getting a leg up on somebody’ all the little catch phrases. But yeah, it was, that is not reflected in the constitution that we have now. There’s absolutely nothing in there that pertains to Anishinaabe values, traditions, language, anything. And in fact, one time I was listening to a college president at a tribal college say, ‘When our elders wrote our constitution, they were thinking about us,’ and I had a copy of the constitution and I was flipping through it going, ‘Our elders didn’t write this.’ This was a college president. It was one of the boilerplates and I was like, ‘Well, they might have adapted it or basically modeled after it, but an Indian person didn’t write this. I know that.’ I didn’t say anything, but it was, so we really have come a long way from the way we, our traditional customs and systems were applied to leading a nation.

Ian Record:

You mentioned who wrote the constitution and that’s a topic we often see a lot of general understanding among people who are concerned about constitutional reform and the inadequacies of their current constitution in Indian Country. They’ll say things like, ‘We’re an IRA tribe and we have an IRA boilerplate constitution.’ But what we’re seeing I think in a good way now more and more is that more tribes are going back and gleaning the origin story of their constitution, going beyond just analyzing the words on the page, but saying, ‘What was going on at the time that this constitution was formed? What can the elders tell us about who was in charge and how, just how dominant the BIA or some other outside entity was in the formation of this document?’ Because as you said about Red Lake’s constitution, in most instances you can read this and realize in a heartbeat that this was not written by an Indigenous person or this does not reflect the voice of an Indigenous person. This was obviously someone else’s product. And it sounds from some of the video work that the reform committee’s doing that that’s precisely where they’re focusing is, ‘We’ve got to bring to the people a sense of context for where this constitution came from.’

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, some of the, at one point there was dozens of people on the tribal council and of course there was one central figure, again. Somewhere along the line you see just where respect was lost for chiefs, a total disregard for tribal chairmen and they were viewed more as adversarial people and maybe coopted by outside entities and not basically viewed as a person. This is a person who’s looking out for all of us. I went to NCAI [National Congress of American Indians] in Tulsa, Oklahoma several years ago and a young man stood up there in general assembly. He said, ‘I really got to hand it to you tribal leaders, especially chairpersons.’ He said, ‘My dad was on a council for many years and we saw what he went through as a family, what affect it had on him and on us as a kid growing up in a home of a tribal leader, and the toll it took on him and how much he poured into it. I really got to hand it to you. It takes a unique breed of person to step up to the plate and take the arrows in the back and take the bullets from the front.’ So the fight is out there, but you’re just getting hammered from fighting. Sometimes it’s so, so hard to try to do things for the people when a lot of times you’re perceived as somebody who is not looking out for their best interest, regardless of how much progress, what you’re doing.

So those definitions I think again really need to be re-evaluated and that’s where the lack of culture, the lack of, like in our language: [Anishinaabe language]. That’s, ‘There’s a man standing out in front of his people.’ All the people are here and there’s a man standing out there. That’s my Indian name that was given to me by an elder many years ago. I wasn’t a chairman then when I received that name, but somehow it happened for me. That’s part of our traditions and our teachings. I believe that the Creator up there has a plan for all of us and things do happen for a reason. So just the, how that factors in, the leaders are chosen not because he’s going to promise me a raise. Leaders were chosen because you say, ‘Well, this leader has a good heart and I know that he’s going to give everything that he can for the people.’ That is lacking in constitutions now so I think that the, if you connect those two together, then they’ll perceive tribal leaders to be more as human beings and more of caring individuals and not so much, ‘We’re fascinated by watching this individual topple,’ or ‘we need to get our guy in there.’ And then sometimes unfortunately across Indian Country, you have some pretty good things going on that are toppled because of an election and then later on the people are like, ‘Oh, geez, maybe we shouldn’t have, ’ And sometimes there’s others who need to have the next one come in and take over.

Ian Record:

So it sounds like in talking with some of the other folks that are involved with the Red Lake reform effort that it’s beginning to take root and more and more people in the community are beginning to get engaged, the turnout at some of the community meetings has been really strong, people are beginning to share their aspirations for what a new constitution and ultimately a new Red Lake future will look like or should look like. But I assume that you’ve observed,  I assume you’ve observed some challenges. Has there been some blowback to this reform effort? Are there people that are perhaps looking upon it negatively for whatever reason? And is that to be expected and perhaps how do you see the reform effort sort of dealing with those sorts of challenges?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think some of the people who are actually assigned to do or appointed to do the reform effort too, they have their own renditions or their own ideas and, some of the things I’ve seen is, ‘Well, we need to create new policies for human resources,’ and, ‘the programs need to be, ’ which has absolutely nothing to do with constitutional reform. And there’s others who have their own idea, who want to impose their own vision and not the collective of the people, Anishinaabe. Some want the language incorporated in, succession, those type of things and others have just adamantly said, ‘Well, you know what, I don’t know about that. I think this is, we don’t know if we trust this. This has worked up to this point so far.’

As far as the leadership, some of the leaders are like, ‘Hey, great. Anything that’s going to take away power from one individual,’ like the old Lord Atkins and immortal law, absolute power corrupts absolutely. If power’s concentrated in one figure for a long period of time, eventually the individual will become corrupt and those type of things. And so those type of things have been talked about is term limits and so there’s, it’s good healthy discussion. All of it is really, really good healthy discussion.

Some of the drawbacks I think from the leadership is that, ‘Well, geez, if we do this, does that mean we’re not going to have the power that we had or we’re not going to be as effective and what is our job then? The people elected me to provide for them and do this and do that and they have expectations of me and if I’m in a position now where I don’t do those things for them anymore, then I’m probably not going to be around here for very much longer.’ So the education piece also starts to radiate out to the leadership where they start to see that empowerment is a good thing for the nation, but it might necessarily be a good thing for them if they’re of the mind that they want to hold on to power.

And one of the things that I experienced being a younger chairman coming in, there was no Chairman 101 and all of the tribal council members who were there, they were not falling over each other to come and educate me on what it’s like to be a tribal leader. I don’t think they had expectations of me being there very long. So why are we going to do that?

So a lot of it is, you can go to school, you can get educated in American Indian history and law and federal Indian law, policy, sovereignty, treaties. You can study tribes all over the place, but when you walk into the office on day one, it’s like all of that is like, ‘Oh, okay. Well, that's not really what I’m doing here. The people have expectations that are aside from that.’ And a lot of times leaders come in and they see it that way. It’s like, ‘Well, hey, I’m here to satisfy people.’ And those are the ones that, they’re a little more resistant to empowering and allowing the nation to grow.

Ian Record:

You touched on one of the major challenges that I think a lot of tribes get sort of a cold splash of water in the face or a wakeup call is when they actually ratify new constitutions, there’s sort of a sigh of relief. ‘We cleared that hurdle,’ and then it hits them that now the hard part comes. ‘We’ve actually got to implement this thing.’ And part of the challenge then is you’ve got to educate not only the people about how the new government works, but you’ve got to educate your leadership about what their role is and how that role may have changed. And from what you’re saying, it sounds like that means that people have to take a whole new approach to how they govern, how they make decisions, how they view their role, how they interact with their constituents. It’s potentially a completely revolutionary process, right? And from what I’ve heard, Red Lake is considering comprehensive reform and not what you’ve talked about that’s happened in the past where there’s sort of these piecemeal little changes here and there, but we’re looking at the whole thing.

Floyd Jourdain:

Right. Yeah, I think it is, a more comprehensive approach is why just change one tire when you can change them all and the leadership taking a look at, ‘Well, if this happens, ’ And I give one example where a tribal council member said, ‘Well, then what are we supposed to do? If we’re not running the programs and we’re not overseeing the businesses and we’re not calling all the shots here, ? The people elect us to do these things and so then what are we supposed to do?’ So you can see how far reaching the influence of tribal leaders can be when they do not have a specific set of duties that they were elected to do. And changing that culture, it is a process and it would be like a fish out of water. They walk out of the ocean, they’re on the beach and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, this is not good. I can't adapt to this.’ Two minutes later they’re going to want to run back in the water. So it’s again passing down, and our elders teach us this. They say, ‘The knowledge that you have acquired in your lifetime, you have a duty to pass that on to the ones that are coming. Because you’re connected to your children, your grandchildren and just because you might be in the position you’re in right now, doesn’t mean you’re always going to be there. You might flop over tomorrow and take everything with you. So you have a responsibility to educate the ones coming up.’

So I’ve always been fascinated by demographics and numbers and political science and statistics and watching trends, especially in Indian Country with the generations coming up in the education systems that are happening. They are going to inherit everything. We have a massive reservation, hundreds of thousands of acres of woodlands and lakes and lands and resources and a government system that is very fragile. I had an elder one time tell me, ‘Buck, it’s really refreshing to know that some of these younger people coming up or even some of the older ones that we’re not really in tune with what is going on, now they’re getting interested, they’re getting involved and that makes me feel good as an elder because I know I can go off to the Happy Hunting Ground, lay my head down, knowing that our tribe is in good hands and it’s moving in a positive direction.’

Ian Record:

One of the issues that Red Lake has been focusing on in early stages of the reform effort deals with whether and how to remove the Secretary of Interior approval clause from its constitution. Why the attention to that specific issue do you think?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think that’s always been like a myth that we have to check with the Great White Father every time we do something. And over time with Red Lake, the sovereignty and the uniqueness of the government there, they’ve always maintained that, ‘Hey, we really don’t have to check with anybody? Do we really?’ And whenever there was a political fight going on, one party would say, ‘Well, hey, you guys can’t kick me out of here. I’m going to tell the Secretary on you.’ And then finally one group said, ‘Go ahead.’ And nothing happened. So I think over time is a misconception that just because we basically modeled ourselves after an IRA constitution that we had an obligation, a congressional mandate or something from the Department of Interior that, ‘Hey, you can’t do anything until you check with us,’ and Red Lake didn’t do that. So we haven’t been checking with the Secretary of Interior all of these decades, why should we start now?

So I think over time the Band itself, I don’t know if it’s lawyers or historians or chairpersons or whoever said, ‘Well, let me check that out.’ They checked it out and they said, ‘Well, no, it’s not in fact true. We don’t have to get the consent of the Secretary of Interior for anything.’ We have some code of federal regulations. We did away with those. We’ve done some things with business and courts and done some amendments over the years and there was no tribal chairman sending a, or secretary sending a letter off to the Department of Interior. So I think that’s an easy start and it is a start, I think just to get something going. Let’s do this, just to get the momentum going to say, ‘Look, we’re going to eliminate that from our constitution. It’s something we know we can do. It’s a slam-dunk for us. So let’s start there.’

Ian Record:

And it sounds to me like that’s a productive approach to take is to, in knowing that there’s going to be some really controversial issues, constitutional issues that are going to come whether it’s blood quantum or citizenship criteria, what have you, that you’ll ultimately have to deal with.

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, removing the Secretary of Interior clause is important because it also, that’s pretty monumental in itself because at one point, being a self-governance tribe, the Red Lake Band had certain agencies that had federal employees on the reservation for so many years. And those federal, Band members who work for these federal agencies -- IHS [Indian Health Service], BIA and law enforcement, nurses, what have you -- they were like, ‘We don’t want to be under the tribe. We like our government jobs. We want our pensions. We want to be under that safety and security net.’ And the Band has always maintained that at some point we have to strive for self-determination and self-sufficiency and we have to manage our own affairs and at what point are we going to pull ourselves out from the cover of this almost a demeaning subsidiary of the federal government itself.

Ian Record:

I know it’s still early, but looking forward, what in your view, when all’s said and done, will success look like for Red Lake in terms of constitutional reform? If everything goes right from your perspective and the process reaches its fruition, the outcome will be successful if what?

Floyd Jourdain:

I think if you have a new generation educated on the tribe, treaties, history, the role of government and also have a comprehensive plan and diagram of what the nation should, a healthy nation should look like. That in itself would be a huge, huge victory for the people. The empowerment is important and the education and the empowerment of the people is important because there’s certain things that people want. They want to be healthy. They want to be safe. They want clean water. They want land. They want their leaders to be looking out for them and they want their children and the generations coming up to preserve what we have: our culture, language and our traditions and our land. And I think that’s important and if we have a document or a guiding, some guiding principles and rules that not only the people have to go by, but also the leadership has to go by as well and that’s tempered, is balanced, it’ll build trust, it’ll build stability in government. It’ll be, it’ll contribute greatly to building an economy, strengthening our tribal courts. Because otherwise, if you have, there are no definitions, then you have a lot of the dysfunction that happens in Indian communities.

Ian Record:

I’d like to switch gears now and talk about governance and leadership and the relationship between the two. We’ve talked about leadership a lot already, but just recently, in May 2014, you lost in your bid for another term as chairman of the Red Lake Nation. I was following that election closely and was struck by how graciously you accepted your electoral defeat and in particular how you worked to ensure a smooth transition from your administration to your successor’s. In fact, at the council meeting just on June 10th, just about a month ago, where you handed over the reins to the incoming chair, you were quoted as saying, ‘Anything I can ever do, Mr. Chairman, I will be here for you.’ I wish I could say that is an approach commonly taken by outgoing leaders in any government including Indian Country, but unfortunately it’s not. I’m curious. Why did you take that approach that you did? It sounds like it comes from some of the teachings that have been imparted to you earlier in life, but maybe if you could just elaborate a little bit more on why did you take that approach?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, you’re right, a lot of that come from my parents, my mom and my dad, my grandparents. And embarking on leadership prior to being an elected tribal leader, I was also a mentor for youth and I worked for youth programs and trying to help people with their personal struggles with addictions and those type of things. So to keep hope alive and to keep dreams alive and to keep a positive attitude, I think that’s important. I’ve served as a conduit between one generation of people, our elders who are starting to leave us now, and the next generation coming up. So to keep that transition going and realizing that our lives are so short, that there’s value in supporting someone who’s coming in and continuing.

And like I said, there was no 'Chairman 101.' Now you can be surrounded by thousands of people and be the loneliest person on planet earth. And I know what that feels like. There’s very few people who know what that feels like and one of the things I spoke to in that inauguration as well was holding the weight of the people. It can be grueling and there are rewards, but there are times when you really have no one else to look to. ‘Who can I talk to about this? Is there anyone that,  Well, there’s Buck over here or there’s maybe Bobby [Whitefeather] and there’s like on this entire planet there might be one or two people that know what I’m going through that hopefully I can call them and consult with them or maybe they can help me with an issue.’

So I think it’s important to keep those doors open and when you’re talking about a nation, there’s a momentum that’s building, there’s a new generation coming, there’s, and a lot of times we like to think that, ‘Oh, geez, just because I’m out of here, I’m going to kick down the house of cards. They won’t have me to kick around anymore.’ It doesn’t work that way. The tribe will go on. The people will go on. The progress, that’s one of the scary parts about leadership is that everything that we’ve built, hopefully it won’t get all dismantled and then we’ll go back several decades to where we were before. I think people like to think that that’s going to happen, but I like to believe that we are good people, all of us.

These campaigns, they can be brutal, they can be ugly. The people a lot of times, it takes on a life of its own that they get so caught up in all of these things and at the end of the day, tribal leaders, though, they don’t wish each other harm or, we don’t want the next ones coming in to do bad because if they do bad, then we all do bad. So I think it’s just something that was taught to me was that, ‘Don’t go stomping off muttering and hanging your head and kicking a can.’ Just, you move to the next chapter and hopefully another door will open.

Ian Record:

So I’m curious, I know it’s, you’re what about two months now into your post-chairman existence, but how do you conceive your role now as a former elected official in terms of nation building and contributing to some of these nation-building initiatives like this constitutional reform effort that’s currently underway? Because you spent 10 years building up an incredible knowledge base. Not just in terms of about the needs of the people because you’re a public face and people come to you and share their problems and share their aspirations, but also because of your knowledge of how your current system works, the governance system and perhaps what could be improved. How do you view your role now that you’re no longer in the position of chairman?

Floyd Jourdain:

Well, the transition is tough, especially if you go from 100 miles an hour to 20 overnight. And you go through certain stages of, ‘What’s my role now? I’ve been doing this for so long.’ I think passing that on is what I talked about. There wasn’t anybody that I could come to and say, ‘Well, I’ve run into a huge, huge situation here. Who do you turn to?’ So all of those experiences, the life experiences and the knowledge and all of the things that have happened over time, I think it’s important to share that with people, whether that be teaching or writing a book or just being in the community maybe as an elder or trying to get involved more again in the grassroots just to pass on what it is, in a good way, to pass on to the next generation some of the things that they otherwise wouldn’t know.

Ian Record:

Well, Chairman, we really appreciate you taking some time out of your retirement, your hopefully short-lived retirement, and sharing your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us.

Floyd Jourdain:

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Ian Record:

Well, that’s all the time we have on today’s program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute’s website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2014 Arizona Board of Regents.

Justin Beaulieu: The Red Lake Nation's Approach to Constitutional Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Justin Beaulieu (Red Lake Nation), coordinator of the Red lake Nation Constitution Reform Initiative, provides a detailed overview of how the Red Lake Nation's constitution reform committee has designed and is implementing a methodical, strategic, comprehensive approach to reviewing and reforming the nation's constitution that puts primary emphasis on full, meaningful participation by the Red Lake people in the process.

Resource Type
Citation

Beaulieu, Justin. "The Red Lake Nation's Approach to Constitutional Reform." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Walker, Minnesota. July 9, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I'm your host, Ian Record. On today's program, we are honored to have with us Justin Beaulieu, a citizen of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota. Justin currently serves as Coordinator of the Red Lake Constitutional Reform Initiative and earlier this year he was chosen by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development to serve as one of three members of the inaugural Cohort in its Honoring Nations Leadership Program. Justin, welcome and good to have you with us today."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Thank you, Ian. It's a pleasure."

Ian Record:

"So I've shared a little bit about who you are, but why don't you start off and just tell us a little bit more about yourself?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, I'm a father of two beautiful children with my wife Anne and pretty much my job and my kids are my life. I spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I like to hunt, fish, trap, do a lot of the cultural activities, go ricing and maple syruping. It's...just kind of live the old way and I learned from my grandpa and my dad."

Ian Record:

"That's great. The reason I wanted to sit down and have a chat with you today is because of your involvement in Red Lake's constitutional reform effort, which is still very much early in its development and we'll talk about that, but I wanted to start at the beginning. And based upon your knowledge as a citizen of the nation and obviously your involvement as coordinator of the actual reform initiative, what in your view prompted Red Lake to go down the reform road to begin with?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think -- and this conversation's been going on for a long time -- we had a discussion with Chairman [Darrell] Seki, our new elected chairman, the other day and he was talking about how his grandfather and grandma used to talk with other elders in the tribe and this was probably in the late 20s, 30s and they were talking about how our constitution then, the 1918 constitution, it didn't align with our cultural values or who we are or what we're about to what we felt was important as a people. So then as a nation, I think that has been passed along from parents to children to grandchildren to great grandchildren and finally we did a GANN [Governance Analysis for Native Nations session] in 2010 with Native Nations Institute and I think that was one of the catalysts that kind of drove that conversation into the forefront that said, ‘Okay, we can do this now. We've been talking about it for a long time, let's go ahead and do it.'"

Ian Record:

"So I should mention a GANN is a Governance Analysis for Native Nations session. It's a tool that nations use to assess their current governance systems and constitutions being part of that. When I first met you, you were a member of Cohort 2 of the Bush Native Nation Rebuilders Program and at that time you were working for Mille Lacs Band."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

"And you've since returned to your own nation, Red Lake, and I'm curious, how did you become...how did you come to serve as coordinator of this constitutional reform initiative, and maybe shed a little bit of light on what your role is within this effort?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Sure. Okay, we'll start at the beginning. Sam Strong, he went to Cohort 1 and he was part of the participation that did the GANN analysis and he was part of the team that brought me back to Red Lake. He had made a phone call, we had met through the Rebuilders. I didn't know Sam from anybody. He grew up in North Carolina and he went to school out east so we didn't have any previous history. So we met through the program and he called me and he said, ‘Would you mind coming home to work?' And I said, ‘Yeah, I'd love to. I've been planning on trying to find something.' I'd actually applied for three other jobs and the way it worked out I didn't get those...I didn't even get interviews for most of them because they would just fill them with whoever they wanted to at the time. So when he said, ‘Do you want to come back home,' I said, ‘Yes, I would love to.' And then he told me what it was for and I was really excited because with the conversations with my dad, with my relatives and with other people, we identified that the constitution is the first step in reassessing our governance and restructuring it to what we need as a nation to move us into the next generations. So that was kind of how I got involved in the process.

And my job as the coordinator is, we have a committee of 13 members who are...they're identified into each individual group. We have Redby, Red Lake, Little Rock and Ponemah. We have two from each one of those districts and they're the representatives that represent those people there. So they're the liaison between the people and their voice and then the committee. And then we also have a chairperson and we have a cultural advisor and we have a legal advisor. So those people are all citizen-members of Red Lake and my job is to help them to engage the community, is to get out there and do the grassroots, hit the ground running, try to figure out what they want.

But initially when I first came on, I was hoping everybody would be at the same level of education that I was with...and that wasn't the case. So we did probably like six to eight months of just real intensive training on what is a constitution, what is our constitution, researching our history, how did we get those constitutions, what was the relationships between the tribes and the governments, whether it be the state or federal during those times and what was...what were the catalysts of why they wanted to make an actual constitution in the way they did. So we did a lot of research and we put a lot of time and effort into figuring our what other tribes have done, what our tribe did in the past, how they made decisions and it was really an enlightening and learning experience for the whole committee.

So from there then I get to connect them with the community. So I coordinate community events, I coordinate... we do like powwows or celebration feasts. We also do just small group meetings. We do an advisory meeting. So my job is to make sure all of those go well, get all the people there, do all the coordination, get all the food. So it's a really intensive job, but I'm pretty good at it so I hope I'm doing a good job so far."

Ian Record:

"So you mentioned when the group first got together and you guys were trying to wrestle with, ‘How do we tackle this and this challenge that's before us and how do we develop a process,' that there was some internal learning that needed to take place and it started with developing a constitutional history of Red Lake. How important is that and what is the constitutional history of Red Lake? Where is your current...I guess first and foremost, how did Red Lake come to have its first written constitution and how did it come to have the current constitution that it governs by?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Okay. So in 1918 we created a constitution and that constitution, it's basically identified a chieftain system, which we had the clan systems before then so it was similar to the same kind of system. But we needed to identify people to go to to make decisions about resources, about...because the government wanted trees, the lumber barons were there, the railroad was trying to come through. so there was a lot of people that needed to get access to those and also needed resources to go in and out of what we had as the current...the reservation. So when...they didn't have...they didn't know who to go to like, ‘Well, what clan deals with this or what clan deals...?' Instead they just created the constitution so they knew, ‘Okay, this is who we go to when we need to make a decision based on do we need to...require X amount of land or we want to get these trees from here so who do we talk to?' So that was one of the ways to limit the confusion between the federal government and also the businesses that were trying to do business with the tribe.

And then ultimately in 1958 we created a new constitution. This was a boilerplate IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] constitution and, that's essentially what it was, but they had been proposing since 1937, 1938 to get that constitution in place, but the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was dragging their feet and saying, ‘No, the way it's going right now with Red Lake, we like it. We like the way it's going.' They did a big land grab with us. They got 11 million acres and we got to keep our tribe intact. We fought the Dawes Act so there's no allotment. Red Lake is one whole parcel, which I think that the foresight that our ancestors had for that was amazing. But in retrospect, looking back at it, the BIA had their hands in a lot of things for Red Lake, but Red Lake was a champion of sovereignty so they were pushing back and so they didn't want...’No, we don't want to implement this constitution because then there's democratic rule, then there's going to be some...we like the way the chief system works so we can just go, ‘Hey, we need this,'' and it was easy to work. So ultimately in 1958 they finally pushed it through and they adopted the revised constitution for Red Lake and that has been what we have been governed by since then."

Ian Record:

"So it sounds from talking with others that are involved in the Red Lake reform effort that there's a sentiment among many in the community -- including, as you mentioned, some of your own relatives -- that this current document that we govern by, it's not a product of us, it's not reflective of who we are. How much of that is driving this current movement for reform?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think a lot of that is. We look at our culture and our values that we hold to high esteem and none of those things are involved in that constitution. There is nothing that talks about our children, there's nothing that talks about our elders, there's nothing that talks about our language, our culture, the ways that we made decisions in the past. It's essentially a business model constitution on how to run like say for example a board of directors like Target Corporation. So it takes into account nothing that we hold near and dear to us and talks about our culture, none talks about our land. Our lake is one of the things that we're very much proponents for and stewards of and even that isn't included in there and unfortunately because of that we have lost a portion of Upper Red Lake due to mismanagement of how they did the survey and nobody was held accountable because nothing said in our constitution that ‘We are going to protect our lake in its entirety,' in the whole thing and that's going to be first and foremost. So ultimately we lost because of that."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to go back to the initiative in terms of how it was established. Can you briefly give us an overview of what this initiative looks like, how is it structured and why was it structured in the way it was and what is its I guess ultimate charge?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Sure. Our charge is in the committee and that's who I help, is they're responsible for getting information to the people to give them a reason to kind of respond to stimulus. So if we want them to talk about something like land and natural resources, we put out a survey and ask them for information and then they respond back. And then based off that information we can kind of mine down the next questions to make them...to get kind of a smaller scope of how we're going to detail parts of the constitution and that's worked out well for us. We're separated completely from the tribal government, we're insulated in the fact that they signed off saying that they're going to be hands off for the committee and we also have contracts with each one of the committee members that states that they can't have a direct...somebody in their direct family that's either on the council or is going to serve on the council. So if like say somebody gets voted into office in our upcoming election, we have the runoff, then that means that if they were on our committee they have to step down then because that's in their contract. So that I think is...the way that is structured is good in the sense that it gives the people in the...the citizens, your average every day citizen, it gives them that sense of ‘Okay, this isn't the tribal council's idea. This is ours. This is our document, this is something that we can get behind, this is something that we can put our fingerprints on so to speak and it'll be ours.'

So it's, I think...we learned that from a couple other tribes who have done it differently and it didn't work out so well for them. It either...they either extended their time period that they...some of them even got basically...for lack of better words got their throat cut. They couldn't do constitutional reform anymore so we wanted to make sure when we set it up initially, that was one of my first questions to Sam when he asked me I said, ‘Is the tribal council going to be involved?' and he said, ‘No.' Then I said, ‘Okay, then perfect.' And I think that's the same...I don't think that I'm alone in that. I think a lot of the community members also have that kind of mistrust and it's not to say that our leaders are bad, it's just been over the years things have happened here, things have happened there and that trust has been broken and trust is very hard to build. So then to limit that, kind of the naysayers, or whatnot, we decided that we're going to keep the tribal council out of it and they're going to just allow the people to have this thing and it'll be ours."

Ian Record:

"And how important is that to send that clear message to the citizens who you're trying to engage, you're trying to get them interested in this discussion about reform and get them to offer their input, how important is it to send the message then that this is bigger than any one single elected leader or this is bigger than any current crop of leaders? It's got not just an independent nature to it, but it's got a larger, longer term nature to it, it's got a longer-term purpose to it than just who are the holders of the power right now."

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think the legacy of our forefathers -- like I talked about -- fighting the Dawes Act and that kind of shines through. And then when you tell them, ‘Hey, this is about us,' then they don't feel...they feel safer to share their ideas. They don't feel like there can be repercussions or, ‘My husband or my brother might lose their job or whatnot,' because that has happened in tribes over history that if you start political turmoil then things can happen to your...you can lose your spot on a housing list, you can lose some resources, you can get fired from your job. So making sure that there's that insulated barrier there, people will feel a lot more free to share their ideas and that fear isn't there and then that's where you get that real raw feedback and emotional response to some of these things. Where we talked about our children who are not enrolled because of our own standards of membership to the tribe, they are not covered under the Indian Child Welfare Act. So if something happens to like say myself and when my kids, they're not enrolled right now because they're 1/100th of a percent off of blood. They have enough Native blood to be enrolled in other tribes, but not just in Red Lake. They're not covered under that. They can be taken and then given to...anywhere. They can be sent anywhere in the states or whatnot and that's something that a lot of them it resounded with them like, ‘We need to protect our kids and we need to protect our land and we need to protect our people.' But none of that is covered in our current constitution. It just essentially talks about building a tribal government, a makeshift tribal government and how the resources can be divvied up then."

Ian Record:

"So I've been to the website for the constitutional reform initiative; very impressive. And I know some of your colleagues on the committee are doing a lot of...developing a lot of educational materials that will enrich that site moving forward, but I want to talk a bit about the vision statement because something in there struck me that explicit in that vision statement is this idea of strengthening ideas of self-governance in the constitution. Can you provide perspective on that and what is the nature of the conversation around strengthening this idea of self-governance? Because if you read that the implication is that, ‘Our current constitution doesn't fully enact our sense of what self-governance means.'"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, self-governance, deciding what we're going to do and where we're going as a nation is important. And one of the things that we suffer from is the fact that we have to chase grant money and federal dollars and things like...we always have to jump through other people's hoops. So we're not really governing ourselves. We're governing by dollars or governing to whatever extent that a grant source wants us to do to get some money funneled and to try to help alleviate some of the hardships that the citizens face. So self-governance is taking that accountability, creating our own government, creating our own future, creating what we're going to do for economic development, what we're going to do to create better institutions and governing structure, how do we align our schools with our tribal government and how do we align our schools to be able to help our citizens become entrepreneurs if they want. It's creating a place where our tribal leaders can actually worry about what we're going to do in five years, 10 years rather than worry about who's going to get a job tomorrow or who's going to get a raise next week. Those are the things that...the decisions that they're making on a constant basis, and those are management-level decisions that should be made by the directors and managers. Those are not governance issues. Those are things that I believe and a lot of other citizens believe that those should be dealt with on those managerial levels, not necessarily on a council level. So they're dealing with every day, ‘Who's going to get their lights on,' those kind of things, when they should be worrying about, ‘What are we doing strategically to move ourselves into the next 10 years, next 20 years?'"

Ian Record:

"So you've touched a bit about...you touched on a bit already about some of the things that you guys are doing, some of the activities that the reform initiative and the committee members in particular are engaged in. Can you talk about some of the strategies you and the committee are taking to engage the people and sort of hook them in and then keep them engaged throughout what could be a multi-year process? From everything I've heard from you and others, you're going into this knowing that this is going to take a few years to get done if we want to do it right."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes. So we started off and once we got the information that we thought was going to be relevant to us to start the process, we started off by doing an initial survey. We did some excerpts in the papers, we did some kind of op-eds and discussing what we're doing, what the project looks like, what the timeline is so people could get an idea of, ‘Okay, if you ask us some questions, we're not going to expect you to give us a new constitution in two weeks or in a month, something like that.' So they understood the process and the timeline. And then we also first initially started talking about things that are near and dear to people's hearts. So we talked about language and culture, which is very important to us, to our tribe, to our nation and we also talked about our natural resources, which is another thing that we hold very dear. So that was the thing that we could get everybody to rally behind. So it wasn't a polarizing thing, it wasn't like talking to them about membership or something like that where you've got people on extreme opposites of that continuum. It was easy for us to transition everybody into getting behind the project and see what it is and then give them feedback on that level. We also met people where they were so if they couldn't come to a meeting, we offered the website, we got a Facebook page, we got a YouTube site that we up materials on. So if we have something that we think is really important, we'll put it out on those mediums so that they can see it on the phone when they're in the car or at their house. If we've got elders that can't make it into a meeting, we can bring them a DVD of what we did. So it's really important that we find out who needs to be at the table and then find out how to get them there or find out how to bring that table then to them."

Ian Record:

"You've talked about some of the strategy you guys are employing to get and then keep people engaged and I'm curious, what are some of the challenges that you've encountered thus far? I know it's early, I know you guys are in terms of full-bore implementation of this reform process you're about a year in or so, but what are some of the challenges you've encountered and how are you working to overcome those?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"I think life is the biggest challenge. People have lives, people have things that they're concerned about. They're concerned about keeping food on their table, their lights on. Those are real-world issues and we're not a rich tribe. We don't have money coming in from casinos, and so we're just trying to combat what the I guess side effects are of that, then try to keep people engaged in that. And it's hard when you're looking at something that's a grandiose idea like a constitution versus, ‘How am I going to get food in my fridge for my kids.' And then also get them to say, ‘Okay, now I need to stop what I'm doing over here and invest some time into this.' So it was hard to initially capture their attention, but then keeping them engaged is something that's been very difficult. I think being transparent and continuing to kind of not so much bombard them but keep them up to date with information has been the easiest way. Posting things on Facebook, questions, throwing ideas out there. If somebody comes by my office and they have a really great idea, I'll put that out on Facebook and put it on our website and say, ‘What do you guys think of this?' And it gives people an opportunity to weigh in and then those things get shared by a bunch of people and pretty soon it's kind of like this landslide of things coming in. So it's easy in that sense where if using a tool, a technology like Facebook that something can happen like this and next thing you know 10,000 people have seen it. So just kind of capitalizing on those things has been an easy way to try to alleviate the issues of life happening.

Another thing that's recently happened is we went through...we lost our chairman. We lost 'Buck' Jourdain and that's not to say that the new Chairman Darrell Seki isn't going to do a good job, but he [Jourdain] was a big supporter of constitutional reform, which isn't bad or good; Darrell Seki is also a big constitutional reform proponent. And so he comes along and says, in his statement he says, ‘I'm going to support this fully.' But there's other people that are on the council that may not like the idea of losing kind of the way things are...change is a hard process for anybody, it's hard for me. So then if you go in and somebody identifies, ‘Uh oh, this might change the way we do things.' ‘Well, we've been doing this...I've been on council for 15, 20 years. What are we going to do? I won't know what I'm doing.' So that's kind of scary for them. So it's easier for them to kind of sit back and not help us with it and in the same sense we did tell them to kind of stay out, but those have been two of the things that have been kind of the hardest to keep people engaged because of the idea that once you...when you have an election, it is a polarizing thing. Families start fighting and people who are husband and wife start fighting. It gets down to that molecular, granular level that we have to try to keep these people focused on the big picture and not just the here and now."

Ian Record:

"So keeping them focused on the big picture; and you mentioned people have real issues in their lives, people are busy, in many tribal communities there's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of social ills that people are wrestling with, it's very time consuming, it distracts their attention from these sorts of things. Isn't part of the way to combat that though is instructing people on the role the constitution plays in their lives currently and then how a stronger constitution could benefit their lives, enhance their lives, enhance the lives of their children, that sort of thing? Is that part of the argument and the education that you guys are sharing with citizens in these community meetings and through other ways to say, ‘Look, the constitution matters. You may not see it operating in your lives every day, but it matters and on many levels'?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, when we first started, probably about 85, 90 percent of the people had never even read the constitution, didn't really know what it meant and didn't know how it applied to their life. And that was one of the questions, like you said, we got was, ‘Why does this matter to me?' So then finding out that tie between where we're at now and some of the problems that have stemmed from us not having a constitution that matches our culture and then identifying with them some places that have changed their constitution and look at the things that they've been able to do now. They've been able to grow as a nation, they've been able to implement new procedures that helped them get new economic opportunities, that helped them revitalize some of their language where they were losing it, get some more fluent speakers. These are things that people really, really want and these are things that our current constitution isn't going to allow to happen. So that aligning their ideas of what they want in their own lives with what the big picture is that'll help the tribe is something that we've done as a committee and is part of my job, yes. And it's been very important on keeping people engaged and also identifying with some people who were the ones sitting on the back like, ‘Oh, I don't think that I really want to get involved in this.' ‘This matters to you.' ‘Why does it matter to me?' ‘Are your kids enrolled?' ‘Yes.' ‘Are your grandkids enrolled?' ‘Well, no.' ‘Aren't they part of your family?' ‘Yeah.' ‘Are they part of this tribe? Well, I guess not. So let's talk about that. How can we figure this out, because these are problems that a lot of people face? You're not alone in this.' So then they're like, ‘Oh, that's...okay, so the constitution can do that?' ‘Yeah, the constitution covers our government and how it...how we as a people want that government to function.'"

Ian Record:

"One of the issues that Red Lake has been focusing on and discussing in the early stages of the reform effort is whether and how to remove the Secretary of Interior approval clause from its constitution. Why the attention to that specific issue?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Well, historically Red Lake has been a champion of sovereignty and also pushing the limits of what the government thought was okay and not okay and that's one of the things...if you look back to the Roger Jourdain era, he was going to D.C., he was a very vocal person, he was the "squeaky wheel" that pushed a lot of these issues that other tribes also face into the laps of Congress to say, ‘What are you going to do about this?' So then looking at that, Red Lake has not necessarily asked anybody what to do. They've decided what to do for themselves, but somehow they included that we have to ask for the Secretary of Interior to approve our constitution, our changes to it, our membership stuff. So those are things that people have said, ‘Well, why do we even have that? We ran the BIA out of here a long time ago.' Well, we wrote that into our own constitution, we asked for that to happen.' So they're, ‘Well, why don't we just take it out?' ‘Okay, let's talk about that.'

They decided to do that, they put it up for referendum vote back in 1990...I think 1998 and it lost by over 600 votes and so that was concerning to me. I was asking -- at the time Bobby White Feather was the chairman -- and so I went and asked him, I said, ‘What was going on during that time? Like why were people...why were they not...they were okay with kicking the BIA out, but they were okay with keeping this language in here that says we've got to ask them for approval to do things. Why were there...' And he said he thinks that it was -- and I'm kind of paraphrasing here -- he thought it was because of the mistrust that [people had of] the tribal government had at the time. They had just gone through an era in 1979-1980 where there was turmoil in our tribal government. There was shootouts going on, there was buildings being burned down, a lot of our history was actually lost because our tribal council building at the time was burned to the ground. So we look at, that's where our archives were, that's where a lot of our important documents were.

So the people were like, ‘No, we think the government should be involved in this because we want them to watch.' But they didn't really know that the government's not really caring what the tribe does, they just...’You put that in there in 1930, they cared back then. 1980, 1990, 2000s, they don't really care what you're doing. Look at some of the Supreme Court cases,' they said. ‘You figure out your membership. You figure out what you're going to do with your people. You figure out what you're going to do with your resources. You now have the ability to do your own self-governance stuff so we're not going to have our BIA people in there anymore.' So they kind of cut those parental ties so to speak, but we still have that in there because we thought we had Big Brother watch so ‘The tribal council can't screw us over,' or something to that effect is kind of what I got out of it. And there wasn't a whole lot of education done with it. They didn't go out and say, ‘This is what's going on with this. This is why it's important that we take ownership back of our constitution.' So I think that if they'd have done a little more education behind that and a little more transparency, I think that probably would have passed back in the ‘90s and we wouldn't be worrying about it right now."

Ian Record:

"I know, being a student of a lot of different tribes' constitutional reform efforts, I know that this is a common topic, common issue of concern, and I know that some tribes have approached this as they engage in sort of comprehensive reform to say, ‘We're going to go ahead and take this...we're going to do this as round one. We're going to get rid of this approval clause.' Laguna Pueblo is a good example of that. Back in 2012 they just said, ‘We know one thing that everybody can...we've gotten everybody to agree on, let's get rid of this language. Because we then want to engage in a discussion about what sort of constitution we want for ourselves without any sort of secondary or perhaps even primary consideration of what the feds are going to think.' Where's your nation right now? I know it's early, but is there a consensus yet on, ‘Is this going to be part of the overall package that we ultimately get the people to vote on or are we going to break this out as a separate amendment again?'"

Justin Beaulieu:

"That's the big question. We've been posing that to the community and one of the things we did is we actually wrote to the Secretary of Interior and asked them, ‘Can we just take this out and you guys will approve it?' He said, ‘Of course. Definitely take it out. We encourage you to take it out because we don't necessarily want to be meddling in your business.' So they wrote us a one-page letter that's going to be good for helping us to educate our own people like, ‘Look, this is something that can benefit us. This is some...we don't need somebody else approving any of our documents, approving what our government is and how it works. That's up to the people.' So that was one of the first steps we took. We also polled them. We did a survey, ‘What do you guys think of the Secretary of Interior? What does it mean to you? How do you think that it applies to us as a nation?' So that was enlightening too to kind of get those different responses and kind of get a feel for where everybody's at in the process. That way we can tailor our message to whatever individuals we have to to try to get the education part of it out so they can make a decision, an informed decision on their own versus, ‘I don't know what that means so I'm going to vote no because I know how things go when it is in there.'"

Ian Record:

"You've made...you've discussed...you've touched on some of the issues that have sort of been coming out in some of these meetings: culture, language, obviously the Secretary of Interior approval issue, membership as you mentioned is a big issue. What are some of the issues that have been bubbling to the surface as you've guys begin to engage the community and get their thoughts on constitutional reform?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"It's a lot of the buzz words like the transparency of the government. ‘Why don't they come and tell us in the individual communities what they've been talking about, what they're doing, what they're working on?' A lot of the people, they find out after the fact like one day all of a sudden there's this building going up. ‘Well, what is this? Why didn't anybody tell us there was a...why didn't anybody ask us what was going on?' So transparency is a huge thing. They want the tribal government to be transparent. They also want them to be accountable. They want them to be accountable to the people and to themselves. So that means...I guess it would mean some sort of job description they've been talking about like, ‘What does...what is the secretary-treasurer, what is their job? What are they supposed to do?' Because how can you hold anybody accountable if you have no idea what they're really supposed to do. So it's looking into some of those things.

Also they want to talk about our economic development not just trying to get casinos, but also working with the tribal members to kind of make it where the tribal government will allow the citizen entrepreneurs to actually have their businesses versus making them get a license, making them jump through this hoop, making them do this, making them do that, which is I think was important to them in the past to be able to kind of control what was going on in the communities, but now there's people who are very well educated. There are some very, very smart people in Red Lake that want to start their own businesses, want a culture that has a bank that they can go to. There's no bank, there's no banking system. So a lot of those things that would be extended to you in an outside world or an outside community is not available there so they want to talk about that.

What is economic development for the tribe? What does it mean for our people? Also, what does it mean for our government to get involved in the economic development versus we're doing it on our own or is it a separate entity, setting up tribal businesses like we have right now in Red Lake, Inc. Is it that? We have Red Lake, Inc. and we've had them for quite a few years now, almost four years, and our businesses are turning profits now. They never did before in the past. Not to say that any one person or any one thing is responsible, but to give that back to people who went to school for business, who know how businesses run, who now how to do budgets and who know how to do just anything that has to do with business. It was good for our tribe because we're making money on those businesses where we were just kind of pouring money into them and trying to get them to work before. So it's how do we separate all those different silos and then how do we then created a government that's going to be looking at what's more important for our future, what's more important for our children, dealing with the issues that we have rather than putting Band-Aids on things."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned this early on about how you, in structuring the reform initiative, 'I'm trying to figure out what's a proven strategy that will work for us,' that you looked at some other nations. Can you talk a little bit more about how you're learning from the constitutional reform experiences of other tribes? And perhaps on the flip side, yes, it's early on but what could other nations that are perhaps just discussing reform right now and when they start reform, what could they learn from Red Lake?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Sure. I don't know for a fact what they can learn from us, but I can talk about what we've learned from other tribes. We've learned from some experiences that White Earth [Nation] had, that the Blackfeet [Tribe] have had, that Gila River [Indian Community]  have had, that the Cherokee [Nation] have had and just looking at kind of dissecting and mining through what they've done and how they got their process going, how they worked it. Did they have a committee, did they just have like a quorum of people that came together? How did they identify those people? How did...so it was kind of a learning experience for us to first initially set up like, ‘How are we going to do this that's going to be a good way, that our people can get behind and respond to?' And what we came up with is a committee of people who are from each individual community so that they felt represented. Sometimes in our communities, and it's a funny thing, the divide-and-conquer mentality. We have four communities and people identify with those communities more than they identify with the nation as a whole. So we decided, ‘Okay, that's how they identify, that's how we're going to work it. We're going to give them two representatives from each one of their separate districts and then those people will be the ones who they go to or can be a liaison for the committee to bring back the information, to bring back the ideas, also to share them forward. So they're like a conduit for each individual district.

And then like I touched on, we needed to figure out how to engage the community because we looked at, let's say White Earth for example, they got together I think it was about 40 people and they did some sessions where they would kind of hammer out all these details. And they did it with good hearts I'm sure and good intentions, but I looked at the videos of the people in the communities and they were really upset. ‘Why didn't you come to us? Why didn't you ask us what we thought? Why weren't we involved in these conversations?' And that's something we didn't want to answer in the future so we thought, ‘We better get them involved first in the process and then figure it out,' versus bringing it to them after the fact and saying, ‘Here this is good for you.' Because historically that's happened for Native peoples throughout history since first contact is, ‘Here, this is good for you, take this.' So we wanted to get them involved so that their DNA and their fingerprints and everything was on it. So their ideas were in it, it resounded with them, they can get behind it and say, ‘I had those ideas. I shared these ideas. These are now in our governing document. That's awesome!' So that was something that we learned from them.

Gila River, with Anthony Hill, he came in and he did a full meeting. We had about four hours. And so basically he came in and told us everything, how the whole process worked for them, how they started, how they got these road bumps along the way, how they worked past some of them. Then their regime change came and kind of put a kibosh to everything so they had to work really, really hard, but their documentation process was I think the thing that we learned the best from Gila River is they kept everything that they did and they kept record of everything they did so that way they could I guess regurgitate that at any time to anybody, ‘Why did you guys do this?' ‘Well, because we polled everybody in a survey or we had a community meeting and this is the results from what you guys said you wanted to see done.' So that was important for us so that we could, in the future, if somebody came along, even if somebody comes along in 50 years and they had no idea of how this constitution was here, they can go back and they can look through the whole process. We have it digitized, we have video, we have it in a lot of different forms. That way if some...one written form or something gets destroyed, it's always going to live on and it'll always be there so people can go back and say, ‘That's how they did that.'"

Ian Record:

"Isn't that critical also for interpreting the constitution because we hear a lot of attorneys, in particular tribal attorneys, talk to us about, the constitution's typically these short documents. They don't go into a whole lot of detail. They set up the basic parameters and judges say this too, ‘If I'm being asked to interpret the constitution, often it would be really helpful for me if I know the back story.' What was the motivation behind why this provision reads the way it does?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Anthony Hill came to me and I actually got to ride with him. I drove him back and forth from the city so he got a good 10 and a half hours in the car with me. So I was asking him and he said, ‘The biggest thing is legislative intent. When I'm sitting on my...I've got my judge hat on, I'm sitting there and I'm trying to figure out is this a constitutional issue, how did they make this decision, how do I apply this?' He said, ‘And so I thought, that's the best way to do that is to actually have that in there with our documentation inserts, this is why we decided this. So then when a judge picks that up they can say, ‘Oh, legislative intent -- this is why they did it so this is how we can apply it.' And then if it needs to be changed, then you know why that decision was made so you know how you can change it then ultimately."

Ian Record:

"So I'm curious, I know it's early but looking forward, if this process succeeds, it reaches its fruition, what will success look like when all's said and done?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Success I think for the committee and for myself, too, is that a new document ultimately gets written that's accepted by the people, but I think the real success is the implementation of that, is getting to that final product, is getting everybody onboard and I think that the way we're engaging the community now and getting their feedback and getting them involved in the process is going to help to expedite that process in the future because then when you sit down and you have a director of a program who's ultimately going to be their daily, day-to-day, basic stuff that they do is going to be impacted by this new constitution, that they're going to know why this stuff was done, how it was done because they are going to be part of the process. So then they can buy into it and everything can move, that transition can happen more quickly and also less painfully, the growing pains of trying to implement that. So I think that for us would be success is when that finished product is done and the implementation is done."

Ian Record:

"And isn't that really critical because when you think about it, when you ratify a new constitution, you're simply changing a document. You're changing paper and then you've got this much larger challenge I would argue of actually having to change the political culture of the community, not just of the elected leadership and those who work within government, but the citizens and how they interface with government, right?"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

"It's an on...does that not require some sort of ongoing education, educational challenge to remind and instruct people, ‘This is why the constitution is set out the way it is. This is what we decided at the time and why and this is what it means for you, citizen, program director, council member, chairman.'"

Justin Beaulieu:

"Yes, for example, let's say I'm under a hardship and I need some help paying my light bill. Right now the process is they can go and just kind of ask one of the council members and say, ‘Hey, I need help. I need my lights paid.' And then they can then in turn pay that, but with the new...the way that the government will potentially kind of be set up it's going to have those checks and balances where if I don't do what I'm supposed to do and use my due diligence, then those...I'm going to have to go through the hoops of whatever we have for programs available to help me out rather than trying to just go right directly to one of my elected leaders and saying, ‘I need help. I want help.' So that's going to be a growing pain for some people because they're used to that. They've been doing that now for 10, 15, 20 years saying, ‘Hey, I need help with this. Hey, I need help with that.' So that is going to be very difficult for some people, but I think the overarching goals that we're going to have in place are going to kind of supersede any of those, the little...the intricate things that are going to have to get ironed out in the end. My hope is that that learning curve isn't so hard and it doesn't take as long, but I guess the people will ultimately be the ones to judge that and then the success will be based on how we adopt it and then implementation of it."

Ian Record:

"Well, Justin, we really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedule -- I know you've got a lot on your plate -- to share your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us."

Justin Beaulieu:

"Awesome. Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, that's all the time we have on today's program of Leading Native Nations. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute's website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us. Copyright 2014 Arizona Board of Regents."

Brenda Child: The Red Lake Nation: Laying a Solid Foundation for Constitutional Reform

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative interview with NNI's Ian Record, Brenda Child, a member of the Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Committee, discusses how the Committee has worked methodically to set in place a solid foundation upon which to engage Red Lake citizens about the Red Lake constitution and whether and how they should strengthen it through reform. She also shares how the Committee began by educating itself about Indigenous constitutionalism in general and the origins of Red Lake's current constitution in particular.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Child, Brenda. "The Red Lake Nation: Laying a Solid Foundation for Constitutional Reform." Leading Native Nations interview series, Native Nations Insitute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, April 2, 2014. Interview.

Ian Record:

"We're here with Brenda Child who's from the Red Lake Nation, Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and we're here to talk a little bit about constitutionalism and constitutional reform. In addition to being an academic -- as we were just discussing -- a professor at the University of Minnesota, you also have the honor of being a member of Red Lake's newly formed or somewhat newly formed Constitutional Reform Committee. And I guess if you can just start by telling us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to be on...become a part of the committee and then we'll sort of delve into what the committee does as they move forward."

Brenda Child:

"So the committee that formed at Red Lake is a...it's a committee apart from the tribal council, but it was their...the tribe's economic development office was in charge of soliciting applications from tribal members to be part of the committee and so I applied as did everybody else and a dozen or so of us were selected to be on the committee. I was very happy about the way...when they asked me to kind of apply to the committee because they said, you...because I teach in the Twin Cities they said I could apply as the representative from Minneapolis or I could apply from my reservation district, my hometown, which is Redby, and that made me happy because I think we're trying to get away from that, ‘Those of you who work in the city or in urban areas...,' because there's so much fluidity now between people who live in urban areas and on the reservation. But at Red Lake maybe some of that might be particularly strong because we do...Red Lake is one of those places that, as you know having visited there, we didn't lose our land or our land wasn't allotted in the course of the late 19th and the early 20th century. So we have a very large homeland and there is some significant part of our population that does live on our homelands at Red Lake."

Ian Record:

"So can you give me a nutshell overview of what the charge of the committee is? So basically this committee is formed and then they're telling you, ‘Here's your job, here's your task, here's how we expect you to carry it out.'"

Brenda Child:

"The great thing about our charge for the constitution committee at Red Lake is that we were able to secure a really nice grant from the Bush Foundation, which allowed us to have a staff on the reservation to kind of organize a lot of our regular meetings and our community meetings, the first leg of which we've just passed in the last week or so where we've been attending public meetings with the community. But we...yeah, so the idea was...we didn't...because we have a staff and because we had this grant from the Bush Foundation, we were able to really focus and think about this as a long term project, not just something, ‘Let's get in and out, think about a new constitution, write it up and see if we can get a tribal referendum.' And so we've tried to be very thoughtful about how we've approached this work and in the first year...so our committee has been meeting for about a year. Fortunately, we're a very kind of congenial group of people who are very supportive of one another. We've been meeting twice a month over the last year. Usually we meet on the reservation and we meet usually for about four hours at a time. We tend to be very deliberate talkers and we listen very carefully to one another. So initially we thought of our charge as being to learn as much as we could about the history of our own constitutions at Red Lake, to learn more about constitutionalism and then to eventually write a new tribal constitution that will be put forward for tribal referendum."

Ian Record:

"You just mentioned one of the tasks, as you see it and as your fellow committee member sees it, is to understand the history of Red Lake's constitutionalism if you will."

Brenda Child:

"Yeah."

Ian Record:

"Let's talk a bit more about that. Why -- from your perspective and based upon what you've been learning from others and from the elected leadership who saw fit to create this committee -- why now for Red Lake? What is, I guess, in play that has prompted this conversation that, ‘We need to revisit our constitution. We need to make sure that it's going to be capable of supporting the direction that we want to take as a nation into the future.'"

Brenda Child:

"So at Red Lake it's sort of interesting, because we have a constitution that dates from 1918 was the year of our first written constitution. So as a committee we've spent time thinking about why...what was going on with our people in the early 20th century for them to decide to write a constitution at that particular moment in time? And when you look at that document, which isn't particularly long, you can see that people were very concerned about...the government was still trying to allot Indian reservations in the 1920s and even though we eventually escaped allotment at Red Lake, which is an amazing story in itself, that...you can sort of see that's what our ancestors were thinking about in those years and so the fear was very real and present that our reservation would be allotted. So I think that's maybe some of the reason why our people at that time decided at that time decided, ‘Let's commit to writing, think about governance on the reservation.'

And Red Lake has this history of hereditary chiefs and at that time there were seven hereditary chiefs who appointed a general council and so that was what governance was at Red Lake in the early 20th century. So the hereditary chiefs played a very important role. Our tribal constitution was revised in 1958 and this is like, for example, when the first mention of citizenship comes up because 1918 everybody knew everybody in the community, it was a very friendly time, there were probably fewer than 3,000 people that lived in all of our communities on the reservation, so times were changing in the late ‘50s. And at the same time, Red Lake has always been very independent of the other...politically very independent of the other Ojibwe people and other bands within the state. And so at that time they wanted to confirm again that they were a separate political entity and independent of the other Minnesota Ojibwes and so that was part of the 1958 constitution. But I think the feeling at Red Lake now among people on our council as well as in the community is that it's time for a new constitution because a lot has changed in Indian Country since 1958."

Ian Record:

"And obviously you're...I would assume along with that that your needs have changed, the challenges you face today have changed and is that part of the conversation to say, ‘We need to make sure that our governance...our foundational governance document is equipped to meet the times,' if you will?"

Brenda Child:

"Yeah. I think that people feel that the document isn't adequate. People feel that there are areas that need to be strengthened in our constitution. When I was mentioning our 1918 and '58 constitutions and how motivated people were at the time to think about the importance of preserving our land, I think that that sentiment is still very strong. We've just finished our first round of community meetings on the reservation and in urban areas in Minnesota as well. And so that concern is still there but maybe it's expressed a little differently than perhaps it was earlier in the 20th century. For example, people today use terms like, ‘Well, what about the sustainability of our forests?', ‘What about the quality of our water?', ‘What about preserving our lakes?' We were talking at our community meetings last week about because we have not only Upper and Lower Red Lake, but a lot of smaller lakes on the reservation, people were talking about the issue of invasive species. Some of those invasive species have been present in other bodies of water within our region in the Great Lakes, but not in Red Lake. And so these are...there are new ways of thinking about how we need to protect our land and a lot of that would be what you would call environmentalism, conservation, the desire to protect our resources. So I think our concerns are the same as our ancestors 100 years ago when they first wrote a constitution, but it's being expressed in new ways because we have new worries right now."

Ian Record:

"So let's delve a little bit more into these community meetings. I know they're fresh in your mind. I believe some of them happened as recently as last week."

Brenda Child:

"Right."

Ian Record:

"Paint a picture for what that environment, what that dynamic was like. I always use the analogy of Jay Leno when he was on "The Tonight Show." He'd do the 'Jaywalking,' where he'd walk around and ask the average citizen on the street about the U.S. Constitution or some other U.S. civics-type question and most people don't know a lot."

Brenda Child:

"True."

Ian Record:

"And I would imagine that that's part of the challenge you face in engaging the community on this and trying to first and foremost get them to care about this and educate them about the role that the constitution plays, good and bad, in their daily lives and how them contributing to a new constitution could actually improve their lives. Is that kind of where you guys are at in the process right now?"

Brenda Child:

"Yeah. So we just finished our first round of community meetings and we decided that we would...I think this was just a scheduling fluke, but we started in Minneapolis and so we had a large meeting in Minneapolis and then we went to the four reservation communities of Little Rock, Red Lake, Redby -- which is my hometown -- and then Ponemah and all of those communities are very different from one another. We ended up in Duluth on just last Saturday and we still have one more meeting that's going to take place in Bemidji, which is the town 30 miles off the reservation. So in some sense that kind of border town, there are a lot of our tribal members whose kids go to school in Bemidji and who work in Bemidji and live there so we're going to have another meeting there as well. And I guess what I saw with our first round of community meetings is that we as a committee work to be on the same page before we started any round of community meetings. I'm a college professor and so I talked a lot about how we organize discussions in the classroom, that we're...that means you don't just come in and show up. You're very well prepared to run a discussion. We talked about questions in common that we were going to pose. We really prepared ourselves and on the evenings of our community meetings on the reservation and in Minneapolis as well, we did everything the same way.

So we started out with a prayer by one of our elders who's on the committee. We started out with a meal, so everyone ate together. And then we showed a short film that the committee had put together, a short eight minute film called "Aangwaamas!," which is the story of our...kind of the history of our constitution. And so we wanted people to be kind of ready to go to get a little bit of history before we started asking any questions. And I think we...it was very important to kind of set the tone in a good way to establish, ‘We are here not to tell you our opinions, we're not here to be divisive in any sort of way. None of us are running for political office,' that kind of thing, ‘but we're here to really engage the community. We're here to listen. We're here to listen to your ideas and to write them down and we're going to bring them back to the committee.' So that's how we tried to set the tone.

It was really great because we have a member of our committee, Tom Cain, Jr., whose father was on the 1958 committee who last drafted our constitution at Red Lake and he talked about, in this little short film we made called 'Aangwaamas!,' he talked about what it was like to be a five-year-old boy and his father's work at that time when politics was mostly conducted in the Ojibwe language and he talked about, as most of us would be as a kid listening to adults. That was his view of our last constitution, but he said...he described it and it was really kind of a very beautiful political process that his father went to every home on...in his district because he was a representative for the Ponemah District at the time and talked about politics, what should be in the new constitution. And he said when his dad would leave the house he would say, ‘Aangwaamas,' like it's time, it's time. So that's kind of become our...that's become our sort of slogan for our constitution, that it was time for our ancestors in 1918 to write a constitution, it's time in '58, it was for them to revise it and times have changed so aangwaamas, it's time for us again."

Ian Record:

"It's interesting you mention that. In working with a lot of other nations we often hear that one of the strategies, one of the many strategies -- and I think the fact that a lot of the tribes we've worked with have succeeded when it comes to reform is because they've employed different strategies -- but one of the strategies they talk about is going to the people, that you can call a community meeting, you can advertise it, but particularly when you haven't built up that awareness of why this matters yet, that it may require you to go out and seek out the people, seek out the particular... the influential people in any community and make sure that they understand what's going on and they're onboard. Is that something that you guys have as part of your formula moving forward?"

Brenda Child:

"In the past year, even before our community meetings started, we...when we would have any kind of public gathering, we would give our surveys at those gatherings and from those initial surveys we learned the areas that were sort of most...areas of pressing concern to our tribal members and those ended up being land and natural resources, language and culture, jobs and environment and also citizenship enrollment and the blood quantum issue. And so when we started our community meetings, and we're going to have several rounds of them, I sort of suggested at the outset, ‘Let's start with land and resources and language and culture,' because I thought it would be important for us...again, this is setting the tone for community engagement...to start with issues that bring us together as a people. It's sometimes...we know we're going to get to difficult issues that people feel very passionate about, but it's important to really be very thoughtful about how you proceed with community meetings because you want to bring your community together and before...and sort of learn how to work together so that when it's time to deal with these more difficult issues, that we're there, we're ready to go, we feel united and we feel like we're ready to make...have those conversations when it's time to do that."

Ian Record:

"On issues I would assume like citizenship which is the..."

Brenda Child:

"Blood quantum."

Ian Record:

"Blood quantum."

Brenda Child:

"Yes, yeah, when we're going to hear a lot of stories from people who say, ‘This is how it should be' or ‘My grandchildren are enrolled' or ‘This is how we've always done it at Red Lake.' We want to be ready for that and also, even when we engage those topics that are difficult, we want to have already established that we're good listeners. We're not here to dictate, we're not here with a specific political agenda, but we're here to listen to the community."

Ian Record:

"So let's follow up on that political agenda question because often we see where reform fails is because whatever...if it's committee or whatever body is set up to essentially lead the nation on reform is either politicized or is perceived to be politicized. How...I guess how important is it and how freeing is it for you to be on firm ground when you say to a community member, ‘We have no political agenda here. Yes, the council established us. Yes, they created the process by which this committee was created, but we have independence, we have autonomy to lead this process in a deliberate fashion that we think is going to work well'?"

Brenda Child:

"Maybe I'm at a stage of things after just the first year where I still feel very optimistic, but I really do believe in maybe this term we use so much now in organizations, in the university and wherever and that's transparency and that's just to be very up front about what we're trying to do, how we're there as ordinary citizens just like all of you and we're here to listen and engage in thoughtful conversation. But I think behind that thoughtful conversation is just the preparedness, to show people that you know what you're talking about, to establish that you're very serious about this business, but also to kind of establish that you're ready, you're going to be ready with the community at some point to write a new constitution for the tribe."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned earlier that you intend to engage in several rounds of community engagement."

Brenda Child:

"Right."

Ian Record:

"And you mentioned I believe in your first response that getting the financial support you did to conduct this effort has given you the flexibility you feel you need as a committee to be very deliberate, to take however much time is needed. Is there a sort of drop dead date for this or is it sort of you're just going to let the organic process unfold and then when that crystallizing moment is there when there's sufficient agreement or consensus in place then you'll know you're ready?"

Brenda Child:

"We have a date for when the grant runs out, but we don't have a date for when we have to put this to tribal referendum. We know that we could do it in a couple of years from now, that would be probably the earliest opportunity, but none of us feel rushed. The committee feels like we needed...we had so much to learn and then we have to engage the community and that there are just many steps and I know when you're involved in a process like that where you're working with your own tribal community, the process is just as important as what we eventually come up with as a written document."

Ian Record:

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but has not a lot of the...some of the initial conversations of the committee and others at Red Lake focused on one particular aspect of your constitution and that's the clause there that says that whatever changes that you make to the constitution must be approved by the federal government, must be approved by the Department of Interior in the person of the Secretary [of the Interior]. Where is that conversation right now and do you expect action on that particular aspect of your constitution before perhaps the rest of the constitutional change that you foresee taking place?"

Brenda Child:

"Yeah. It's possible we could take action on that Secretary of the Interior clause before the final writing of the constitution and some of that we just need to kind of seek out legal expertise. Some people have advised us to ‘just take it out,' and we assuredly will not write that into our next constitution, that we need to have the approval of the Secretary of Interior, but whether we do it now and by special referendum because we'd heard that, some of us didn't even recall this, that during the ‘90s we voted on this at Red Lake and it was not a successful referendum and some of that has to do with I think people didn't understand what it meant. Did that mean, ‘Well, we're going to go without these federal resources if we do this,' and so we're also approaching that in...we're being...we're still taking under consideration the best way to get that message out to the community."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned a little earlier that...you mentioned a little earlier around this issue of the timetable and the timetable you have for reform and that it could be two years, it could be perhaps longer before you see the end of the path on this process and you mentioned one of the reasons for that is because you as a committee have so much to learn and is that...I would imagine that's not just from your own community, that you have a lot to learn from what other nations are doing in this area. For instance, on citizenship for example, that's a hotbed area of activity when it comes to constitutional reform among other nations. So is the committee actively sort of seeking out other tribes or is it..."

Brenda Child:

"Yeah, the committee has...in terms of thinking about learning about tribal constitutions, we've been able to watch what some of our neighbors are doing. The White Earth tribe, not very far from us, are undergoing constitutional reform and so we've been watching what's going on there. We have talked to other tribes who have been successful or not at writing a new constitution and having a tribal referendum. We've also just sought out legal experts and folks that we think would be interesting to speak with on these issues.

One of the people that we had in was my colleague John Borrows who teaches at the law school at the University of Minnesota and I think it was really great to bring him up to have a long conversation with the tribal council or not the tribal council, the committee. So John Borrows came up to really specifically engage with the Constitutional Reform Committee and he was very generous with his time and spent hours speaking with us. And I think it was interesting to our committee because when you say, ‘This is a law professor who teaches federal Indian law at the University of Minnesota,' they're not really expecting John Borrows who's deeply philosophical, who studies and is a student himself of the Ojibwe language and thinks about stories and Ojibwe concepts of law. And so we've wanted to think about those ideas too because at Red Lake, even on the Constitutional Reform Committee, we have people who speak the Ojibwe language and we're very aware of our kind of unique history at Red Lake, having held onto our land as we have over the generations and that this is kind of a stronghold of the Ojibwe language on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes. So all of those things are things that we talk about and...

So I wouldn't just say that we look at just what's going on with other tribes as they write their constitutions but we try to think about practical issues, community engagement, but we also have to think of who we are as Ojibwe people as we proceed through this path of meeting with our community and writing a new constitution because we really want what we ultimately do throughout this whole process to be a very positive work in our community and a positive reflection of who we are as Red Lake Ojibwe people."

Ian Record:

"From your vantage point, isn't that part of what you ideally would hope to see in the final document is something that evokes that unique identity, that unique language, that unique history and if it's not explicitly taking steps to preserve that it's at least acknowledging it and saying, ‘This is how we've gotten as far as we have'?"

Brenda Child:

"Right. It's great to see all the energy out there in Indian Country right now about tribal constitutions, but we kind of live in time where it's sort of a global Indigenous world at the same time. So when I read the constitution of Bolivia, I was just like really greatly appreciative of that amazing document and so we've been looking at that a little bit in Red Lake. So we're interested in what our colleagues are doing around Indian Country, but also what other Indigenous people are doing around the world as they think about constitutions."

Ian Record:

"Well, Brenda we really appreciate you taking some time to share your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us and good luck with the effort."

Brenda Child:

"Yeah. Miigwetch."

Jill Doerfler and Matthew Fletcher: Defining Citizenship: Blood Quantum vs. Descendancy (Q&A)

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Panelists Jill Doerfler and Matthew Fletcher fields questions from the audience, and several participants offer their heartfelt perspectives on the complicated cultural and social dynamics surrounding citizenship and identity in their respective Native nations and communities. 

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

Resource Type
Citation

Doerfler, Jill. "Defining Citizenship: Blood Quantum vs. Descendancy (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Fletcher, Matthew. "Defining Citizenship: Blood Quantum vs. Descendancy (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Sarah Deer:

"At this time again we'd like to open it up to questions and comments. We have a few minutes before lunch and we'd like to have some dialogue based on what the speakers had to say.

Audience member:

"Has there been any talks with the state level officials or any federal officials on how they view what an Indian is and at what point...or what do they expect of Indian tribes? We've been talking about funding, we're talking about land being taken back. Okay. I know in Wisconsin we had a meeting with a state representative and he didn't even know we had 11 tribes in the state of Wisconsin. He knew that all the tribes in Wisconsin were per cap Indians. That was his perception and he was from the southern part of the state. And so a lot of times when we...we struggle with this blood quantum issue is the end game that what does the federal government and Chairman Bugonaghezhisk hit it right on the head though. At some point they don't want to pay no more. And of course I speak for myself that they can never pay us enough for what they've taken from us. And I notice that when I look in the appropriations inside the Department of the Interior. Parks and Services get more money than the tribes do and why is that? And so these are some of the questions on the other side of the line is what does the government...what is their end game? The gentleman here talked about...Mr. Fletcher was talking about that at some point all they want to do is wipe the slate clean and mainstream us into society with no debt to the Anishinaabe people."

Dana Logan:

"Hi. My name is Dana Logan from Grand Portage. My question regarding the lineal descent is if the government has wanted to, like you said, wipe the slate clean, get rid of Indians? So if you are going to go to...are thinking of going to lineal descent and I'm going to use the Cherokee Nation, going to lineal descent and I've seen their blood quantum as being at one-3000th. So at what point if tribes go to lineal descent are we no longer going to be identified as Indian tribes and we're going to be so what the government might say is diluted, there aren't no real Indian left? And so that I worry about a little bit in identity and what the government thinks of us. Myself, I'm enrolled in the Chippewa tribe. I have children who are Northeastern Oklahoma Indians enrolled there at a ome-eighth requirements. They're half, my husband is a full blood Indian. Now, look at their CDIB, they're Grand Portage, they're Canadian on my family's side, they're Cherokee and they're also part Shawnee and Eastern Band, and then in the Cherokees, split you up on what kind of Cherokee you are. So you have all of these things that we do to ourselves but yet we have to protect ourselves as a group of people...I don't like to say a racial group either, but we do need to keep our identity so that the American government doesn't say, "˜You people aren't here anymore and you don't matter.' Thank you."

Matthew Fletcher:

"I'd like to just toss out something. I think the way that the self-determination policy has worked in the last couple decades along with the Supreme Court has looked at Indian identity is to really rail and recognize a tribe's decision as to who is a member, who is not. So if you look at a lot of statutes that Congress and state legislatures have passed prior to the "˜80s really, they all talk about blood quantum, they talk about half blood, quarter blood, who's an Indian, who's mixed blood. The U.S. and most state legislatures even have moved away from that. And so for example a year or so ago the Department of Justice, Fish and Wildlife Service in the U.S. government said, "˜Well, we're going to recognize anybody who's a member of a federally recognized tribe. Blood quantum is irrelevant. Whatever they decide, they are able to with their citizenship card they can carry an eagle feather. We're not going to give them any crap for that.' So that was the policy floating around. What it means is, they talk about tribal membership. Whatever blood quantum is, it's up to the tribes and I think that's a really good development. But that's the politics right now. 50 years down the road, maybe John Roberts type people, and he's the one who asked the question in the Baby Veronica case, "˜Hey, the last time that this kid and dad had a full blood Indian was during the time of the American Revolution in their ancestry.' It was important to him and so maybe that will change over time. But right now, now is where the federal government is deferring to tribal prerogatives on tribal membership, whatever that might be, and I think it's a good time to take advantage of that."

Jill Doerfler:

"Yeah, and there's lots of prevailing arguments as well that blood quantum and this racialization was meant to destabilize politics. The U.S. and native nations have a nation-to-nation relationship. It's not a relationship between a nation and a race and so there's also lots of arguments there that treaties that form a big part of that government-to-government relationship there primarily are not racially based. They're governments making agreements with other governments. The U.S. government racial...the race of Americans is changing over time. We're going to start to see the white race decline and we're going to start to see white people becoming a 'minority' in the U.S. Does that mean if the race of America changes, does that mean that those political agreements are null and void? Most people would argue no because it's still the same political system that's in place. The makeup of the people might be changing, but you still have that government structure."

Audience member:

"So I guess to touch on another one of those stories that we carry with us from our relatives, one of the things that I was taught was if you wonder about who you are, think about yourself when you're done with this world and who is it the ones that's going to take care of you to help you on your journey to the next place. And sometimes that is the defining characteristic, because when you're left by yourself and you're completely dependent upon the people who are supposed to take care of you, sometimes that defines who your identity is. What we have based on these discussions is a converging of social, cultural, political type of discourse -- I guess for lack of...for a more intelligent English word -- but...and how that convergence comes into play. I mention these things and the things that come from me that I work with when I work with my people in my tribe is we never lose that connection we have to our relatives. And that's difficult sometimes, especially when they're adopted away and they're taught these different types of...different ways of doing things.

And so when I was in school there was people who were sympathetic, these non-tribal people who were sympathetic, but they wanted this and they always said, "˜Well, how do you...' -- I used to joke with them and tease them because there's some things you don't share with people you don't know -- I said, "˜Well, if you want to know who's Indian, go ask them what happened to their grandparents,' because almost always you can find a story about the boarding schools. My tribe and my relatives all have the same stories about where our grandmothers went and grandfathers and how we can't stop in...when we travel back and forth and Janesville with my grandma.

And so one of the things that I'm proud of as Ojibwe and as Anishinaabe is the treaties that we have going back to American or Federal Indian Law 101 is the four purposes of why treaties are made. Well, there's a fifth treaty, too, that helps define the contents or your...you reserve the rights of your own identity. And for us, for the Ojibwes and among the Lake Superior Band, our 1847 treaty -- one of them gets overshadowed because that was Bugonaghezhisk's allotment that he got over by Wadena -- but the other part of that 1847 treaty is a separate one, which was the recognition...forcing the United States to recognize that Ojibwes did not recognize mixed blood or half breeds or whatever they called us back then and that all of the people who were among our communities from wherever they came from were considered part of our family. And that's a teaching that we have that...we have these cultural bonds that go across there and so a lot of my [Anishinaabe language] are non-tribal. And for those who don't know what [Anishinaabe language] are, it kind of translates to like 'godmother' or 'godfather' or 'god-relative' that is supposed to help you take the place or help assist your parents in raising you or your family in raising you. And then as we include them as our [Anishinaabe language], we also name them so that the Creator can understand them in the Ojibwe that is the predominate method on how we're conducting ourselves. And so even though we use this more dominant language or English to kind of define our interactions and to articulate these views, I still from the time I was born until the time I pass and I sit there with my grandmothers again and my grandfathers and tell the story of my life as part of our teaching. Ojibwe is the means that identifies us because it doesn't set parameters, it gives you the method to teach you how to come back home. And so that is...the prevalent thing that comes through this is the language. We call that...that's the gift from the Creator. Our work is the land that was given to us or the responsibilities that attach us to the land.

But there's still, I guess, and I'll finish this real quick I guess, but the other part that kind of makes our blood boil and all of that is when we have the people who create these manufactured senses of identity of what it is to be Indian and then they come back and they bring these different concepts. Even though I'm a lawyer and trained just as Professor Fletcher is in speaking English in terms of interpreting our laws, the constitution that we have is probably one of the most detrimental and damaging things that we've done as a tribe because it tries to codify what the idea of a good government is or how to run your people...how to organize your people to do certain things and that gives a tool then for those who disagree with our ways of life. Our grandmothers have prominent places in our society, but it's not recognized in the constitution or when people identify their laws and say, "˜Well, you're not a member because the constitution doesn't say that,' even though my [Anishinaabe language] grew up on the reservation and has done as much for me as anybody else, she's not from Lac Courte Oreilles.

It's a dangerous double[-edged] sword that I think that -- and I'm going to get slapped by Robert here if I'm not careful how I say this -- there's people who take this idea of spreading democracy as President [George W.] Bush had said when he was justifying these incursions and sending among others some of our Native youth into Iran and...or I mean Iraq -- whew, there's a Freudian slip -- in Afghanistan and to these different countries is they're trying to spread democracy back to the tribes in that they want to change their constitutions so that they have these things that are not...don't necessarily arise from us, but they come from this idea that we're going to have participation, that we want representation from different areas and the model that they use is the United States, but yet how can that be a positive model when we have something like the Tea Party that's disrupting the government or we have the idea of democracy and we've got the idea that corporate citizens are now or corporations are now people. And so that just...it makes me nervous and I think it's the responsibility of those who really want to be part of that community to be diligent, to hold true to what your ideas are and to not...if you're going to bring something else in there, bring in also with the open mind of coming into the community and listening to what that is.

I know that there's criticisms split between on reservation and off reservation and it shouldn't be that way because the reservations were something that was given...that was forced on us by the American government because we're actually in the area -- and this is going to get me probably slapped by the Dakota in the room -- this used to be Ojibwe country and there was an 1825 treaty that kind of demarcated this line. It wasn't ours like in exclusion of other people. It was our shared responsibility to take care of this land and take care of these resources. And so this idea of possession is something that got forced into us so that the dominant society could figure out a way to kind of [figure out] who to talk to instead of having to talk to everybody, they picked who they wanted to speak with. And so when they come back with these people with these ideas of changing the constitution so that it incorporates more people, I think that's such a dangerous topic because you're incorporating it under the wrong premise. There's other ways that could be done and that needs to be incorporated into that. If we're really going to have binding, logical extensions of ourselves codified in the constitution, it should be in the language, it should be in the way that those words were intended and it should be representative of the practices of who we are.

My grandma told me -- and my grandma told me a lot so I could go all day -- she told me, she says, "˜When you pass, one quarter of you doesn't go somewhere else, one quarter doesn't go to this other spot. It goes to where you think your family is because that's the teaching that the Creator gave to you. And so when you go up and you say your name, your name is like one slice of your life over the time that you've been given this time on this earth. And so when you hear that and they ask for you, you know where to go to.' And I don't mean to disparage people with different beliefs because I've seen people who are strong in their beliefs and I believe them. The major tenet of me and my lodge is you respect all ways and it just...sometimes though when we respect all ways the first way that seems to get diminished or get erased is the Anishinaabe way and we just...I can't allow that. [Anishinaabe language]."

Robert Durant:

"I won't hit you. I want to shake your hand. Again, my name is Robert and I just want to talk a little bit...no disrespect to all the efforts that White Earth is going through and I'm on the council in White Earth. I too, I have always been afraid of this. The new constitution that's been written, I feel there's so many things that take away from the future and also removing the past on where we're at and what was done and closing the door on so many other issues. And then when there's issues that are talked about, how are we going to deal with this here with programs -- whether it be housing, whatever -- and all the other issues that comes along with that and maybe being censored from working one way or working another way if this thing passes? Then it's said that, "˜Well, we'll tweak it out.' Well, tell you what, that's not what people are kind of voting for. I'm not going to say 'yes' to where you're going to change it anyway so what good is it? Things like that, it really gets to my heart. And then when we talk about to opening these doors to rewrite a constitution that's taken decades of interpretations and decisions and ordinances and then to me it's really sad, because to me it's like the modern day of being fleeced by using enrollment. I get afraid of that. I'm afraid of that. Remember the stories of our tribal nations being fleeced? And then sometimes when we talk about the enrollment laws...I remember listening to some old men talking about [Anishinaabe name] or 'Hole in the Day.' He only would...during the removals come to White Earth, he talked about only the half breeds could come with him. We all know he was killed, but there's a lot of other histories, I read about other leaders they wanted, for reasons, whatever that was. And that's what I think about, but they disappeared in life and who was always behind it, it was always the government. So it's really difficult for me...when I think about this, I'm doing it right now, I'm shedding a tear because what are we doing to ourselves and what are we allowing to happen to us? It's not easy, but everybody is not being taught.

We sent out as a lesson for everybody, White Earth sent out...there's 18,700-and-some members under the last roll that we took. That list was used to mail out a constitution. I asked, "˜Well, if you're going to mail that out, at least have some fairness and mail out the one that we've been dealing with that was revised in the "˜60s.' Well, no it wasn't done because I was intercepted and it wasn't done, so it wasn't fair because people on both sides ain't getting a chance. So when you go for this here in other nations, realize that because we're stepping into something that we do not know and it's scary. I can say that because my children, they're tribal. But I can understand they may make a choice not to be with another tribal or their children, but the thing is I need to have that responsibility to show them who they are too. But I made that choice. Why am I tribal? There's a lot of teachings.

I want to tell you a little story, too, before I quit here because it really gives me an insight. I got a gift, again, there's a lot of gifts. I received a packet of writings done by tribal members; I'm going to share that with you Jim. They wrote manuscripts of...100 years ago they wrote this. I had my administrative assistants type it all out because the paper was frail and it was written beautifully. And they told the stories of what it was. They told stories. Imagine 120 years ago someone 84 years old saying...writing the story of the modern Indian. It makes me angry when I read that, but it was the truth. This topic is really tough and I'm not the only one that feels that way. These are lessons we listen, lessons from our elders, real lessons. Not just a story, but this time as being told...these were handwritten. [Anishinaabe language]."

Sarah Deer:

"I think we have time if you want to respond unless someone else in the audience wants to make sure we get you on record. There we go."

Sam Strong:

"It's not really a response. [Anishinaabe language]. I think for me it wasn't actually in any response to Terry's comments there, but basically when I think about being Anishinaabe, when I think about being Ojibwe, when I think about being from Red Lake, what does that mean to me? It means a way of life. It means living that [Anishinaabe language]. It means being a part of a community that has been centuries in the making so it's understanding that you're a part of that history. That's something for me that I'm very proud of. I'm an enrolled member. I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of my heritage. I'm also proud of...I'm mixed. I'm proud of everything that made me and that's part of being Anishinaabe, that's part of being Ojibwe is understanding who you are and being comfortable with that and then living that lifestyle in all facets of your life.

I think about the past, I think about Red Lake and one of our first leaders, once we started with treat making and all that, his name was Peter Graves and he actually wasn't a Red Lake member. Our first real leader wasn't even a member. He was an Ojibwe person that had moved there. He was mixed, he was half, and you think about the contributions that he made to Red Lake. We consider ourselves unique. I'm sure all tribes consider themselves unique. But we're a closed reservation. We're the only tribe that never ceded control of their land. We're proud of those aspects of who we are, but at the same time you look at today what people are...how they're living and what's going on in the communities and we're disconnected from who we are. So I think it's important to identify that in looking at citizenship. Your community is going to look at where you're at today. What does it mean to be a Red Laker today?

Our chairman always tells this story as kind of a fearful indication of where the community is at. He was at a meeting and one of the guys...it was a forum for an election or something like that and one of the kids stood up and he took his card out. He said, "˜This ID card, what does it mean for me?' And everyone's like, "˜Well, what do you mean?' And he said, "˜Where's my check? Where's our per capita? We have all these casinos. Where's my money? What does this card mean for me?' I don't think that's the prevailing thinking that most of the community members have, but it's out there. That's kind of how the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] would want it. They would want to see us as dependents. They would want to see us as people that our identity is putting our hand out, but that's not who we are and I think understanding that there is...there's that divide. What we have created and who we are are so different from one another.

You think about the teachings and the people that I listen to and that I learn about myself and my culture and some of these people, if you met them on the street, you might think they were Caucasian, but the reality is these people are carrying on the culture and the language. They're not all enrolled members, but these people have dedicated their life to understanding our culture, our language, our traditions and they're carrying that on for our tribal members. And you think about all these people that have helped us get to where we're at today and all these community members that have contributed and it has nothing to do with the percentage of blood that you had. It never has and it never will, but the reality is our communities have become dependent upon the resources from the BIA, from the federal government, so on and so forth and people have started to look at membership as what's going to be put in my hand for free?

And I think the only way to change that -- we're looking at constitutional reform right now -- and you pose this question to Red Lakers, you're going to get a lot of angry people. We're a closed reservation. We've maintained control of our land, so what happens when we open up to lineal descendancy and we have people that are totally disconnected from our land base? Would they potentially put us in a position where we would lose ownership of the land, where the tribe would make a decision to sell it? I don't think so, but at the end of the day, these are the fears that the tribal members bring up when we talk about changing our enrollment criteria. How do we address those?

And to me, it's one of those things...it's obviously mathematical genocide. I think all of us can agree that the current system doesn't work, but how do we move forward in a responsible way, in a way that allows for the people to also grow and the only way to really do that is through teaching your people about your culture, your language, doing all the things that we're talking about here, but it's not a one-day change. Even if you were to make the change from lineal...to lineal descent or whatever it may be, that's not the important piece. It doesn't matter what the criteria are if your community isn't carrying on the values and the traditions of who you are. That's the way it was always taught to me is that the way you live is who you are.

Another teaching that I always was told is, coming into today's world you see the troubles of today with the environmental degradation and all the social ills of the communities and our elders say that our ways are the ways that are going to bring this world back into a better place. That's been our teachings. And how can we do that if we can't even include people that are living in our communities in our traditional ways? You have to think that...what's the long term? The long term is obviously that we need to be inclusive and teach our ways and share those values, but in the short term we have to focus on ourselves. We have to get to a point where our own people understand who they are and their lifestyles. Without that, it doesn't matter how you identify yourself. In 100 years what will our communities be? So to me it's...without the identity the rest is...it's almost impossible to even solve that so it's not to make the...and we're going through the same process so I ask this of all the members of our community when we go out. We have a constitutional reform committee and so they're asking these same questions as well. But the reality is, I don't think it's a one-year thing, I don't think it's just change the criteria, it's what are we doing as a nation to hold onto our identity, to create a better quality of life in our communities and to create for...something that everyone can buy into, not only our people but all Ojibwe people.

I always brag about Ojibwe people because I consider us to be the largest tribal nation. I think from a land base perspective you could make that case pretty easily. But today you see tribal nations that are 100 miles away from one another that are fighting with each other. You have racist communities in between that we just ignore and then we have what you would think would be supportive nations down the road and we're not even on the same page. So who are we as a nation even? Have we forgot who we are as Ojibwe people? Have we forgot who we are as Anishinaabe? When I say 'Anishinaabe,' I mean all Native people. I was hearing some of the speakers earlier and they were talking about what that word meant and for us in Red Lake it means free people, people that live in a good way and I think when you think about what we all...all of our ideals as Native people, it's very similar. So why haven't we come together? Why haven't we come together as a people, as a nation and even as Red Lake Nation? So you've got to start somewhere, but at the end of the day...I think sometimes we focus on all these issues and we forget about where the people are at today. For me, living in Red Lake and seeing it and seeing the suicide, the drug use, the...all the social ills of my community, you would just hope that we would focus on the things that would start to change that and create that pride in who we are and all the other stuff will fall into place. But without that, all the rest is for naught, in my eyes at least. [Anishinaabe language]."

Sarah Deer:

"Thank you. Thank you very much. This has been an incredibly rich and deep conversation, and I'm very grateful for all of the participants." 

Native Leaders: The Purpose and Challenge of Redefining Citizenship

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Several Native leaders share their thoughts on why their nations are deliberating potential changes to their citizenship criteria, and they discuss some of the many challenges that Native nations face in this complex area of governance. 

Citation

Beaulieu, Justin. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 1 (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 3, 2013. Q&A session.

Hall, Chris. "Cultivating Constitutional Change at Crow Creek." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona and the Bush Foundation. Spearfish, South Dakota. April 25, 2013. Interview.

Harjo, Suzan Shown. "Five Decades of Fighting for Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Determination." Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 11, 2008. Interview.

Hill, Anthony. "Constitutional Reform on the Gila River Indian Community." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Presentation.

Wesley, Angela. "Constitutions and Constitutional Reform - Day 2 (Q&A)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 4, 2013. Q&A session.

Suzan Harjo:

"We have our rights of selecting citizens, setting citizenship criteria saying who we are and who we aren't, who is not part of us. That is an act of sovereignty. Citizenship is an act of sovereignty."

Justin Beaulieu:

"I did a research paper about blood quantum too because it was important to me. And one of the things that I identified was that the only people or the only things that are really identified by how much of something they are is some animals and Native Americans. That’s the only thing. So if we’re going to categorize ourselves into a category with animals because that…it’s always kind of been about resources. The federal government didn’t want to be babysitting a bunch of Indians so they said, ‘We’re going to make…if you have a kid with a white person, they’re half,’ and then eventually we’re going to be extinct before we’re dead. So that was good to them. That was good for them, and if that’s what we want to continue, that’s going to be our legacy, I guess that’s our choice.”

Anthony Hill:

"In our constitution, the blood quantum is in there and I’m sure many of you have blood quantum requirements for your membership. Despite all…there was a great emphasis on changing the blood quantum or addressing the blood quantum, but because we were so busy looking at everything else, at the end of this nearly five-year project we didn’t even touch blood quantum. And that was a great failure on our part because the membership of a community is the most important thing. It is literally the lifeblood of a community and if you can’t decide on who should be in your community, you’re not going to have a community in the future. So that was a failure on our part because we didn’t address that issue because we were so busy addressing the crisis that we…the time we were living in." 

Chris Hall:

“I think for me, philosophically, the government is a small supportive entity within a nation. I think the citizenry is the one who outwardly people see as the nation and they should be the ones that are producing. They should be the ones that are exercising that leadership, that autonomy that says that we’re standing on our own two feet. We are capable and we desire our future to be sustainable and we’re not going to give that over to a government institution and we’re not going to give that over to any large umbrella corporation that may or may not support our desires as citizens and define us differently than we choose to be defined. So yeah, it really comes down to the individual’s impetus of making the announcement and the statement, ‘This is who I am, this is what I stand for and this is what I’m willing to do to be a part of this nation.’ And you need people standing beside you that are like-minded.” 

Angela Wesley: 

"When we do go away and have regular meetings with our people who live away from home, that’s always the question is, 'How is this going to impact me?' It really comes down to the constitution gives us the ability to make decisions for ourselves and like this lady was saying, just because people live…our people have been forced to live away from home doesn’t mean they’re not a part of us anymore. But the way our funding structure was from the Department of Indian Affairs is we were only allowed to spend money for people who were living at home. So that was something that we thought was really critical to us governing ourselves is that we would be able then to earn some wealth with resources that we were getting through treaty and to develop our economy so that we could start to provide services to people who live away from home, whether that be housing, health, education, increased medical services or dental services, that kind of thing but we always said that’s up to us. So many of those things were up to us, and that we had to continue to have those conversations as we built our wealth so that the money is being put to where the people want it to be. In terms of reaching out to people and just talking to them and why we would do that, what they can bring, part of what we wanted to do -- with 85 percent of our people living away from home -- is to start to build that vision in our people that just because you live away from home doesn’t mean that your future generations aren’t going to come back. Like you said, those educated people that are out there that can come with different skills to bring into our community when we start to be able to rebuild our economy so we really wanted not just to make the linkage but also to encourage people to start thinking about coming home. Our vision talks about strengthening our culture, strengthening our language, trying to reincorporate our traditional way of governing ourselves. People have to be home for us to do a lot of those things, so we wanted to start to build that notion in people’s minds that yes, it will be possible. We don’t have schooling right now, we don’t have health care right in our community, but let’s work so that we can so that we can start to attract some of those people to come back home and live comfortably in our territories. That’s part of our vision is that our people are able to live at home. And we recognize that not everybody is going to do that but we want more people to be able to do it."