Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Evaluating the Impact of Federal Welfare Reform Legislation in Indian Country: A Policy for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Author
Year

This report should serve as a policy guide to help clarify the complexities of the Personal Responsibility Act for tribal government officials, particularly those in Standing Rock. The guide seeks to: 1) describe and evaluate the Personal Responsibility Act and the provisions that impact Indian people, 2) describe and evaluate North and South Dakota’s proposed TANF plans, 3) present the pros and the cons of the options available to Standing Rock, and 4) recommend how the Standing Rock Tribal Government can respond under the different options.

Resource Type
Citation

Lam, James. "Evaluating the Impact of Federal Welfare Reform Legislation in Indian Country: A Policy Guide for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe." Policy Analysis Exercise prepared for: Jesse J. Taken Alive, Chairman, The Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. May 1997. Report.

Honoring Nations: Tim Mentz and Loretta Stone: Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Monitors Program

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Tim Mentz and Loretta Stone of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Monitors Program present an overview of the program's work to the Honoring Nations Board of Governors in conjunction with the 2005 Honoring Nations Awards.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Mentz, Tim and Loretta Stone. "Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Monitors Program." Honoring Nations Awards event. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Tulsa, Oklahoma. November 1, 2005. Presentation.

Loretta Stone:

"In the year 2000, the Tribal Monitors Program was instituted and partially funded through a programmatic agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers. The Tribal Monitors cover 2.3 million acres of land within the Standing Rock Reservation, which includes land covering two states, North and South Dakota. The sites we protect, survey and document are varied. Sites included are archaeological, which are burial, spiritual, sacred, village and massacre sites; historic, which would include Pre Pick-Sloan Dam; and paleontology, which includes at least 11 dinosaur sites all within Hell Creek Formation. Of these 11 sites, Tribal Monitors have discovered four. We have 66 documented village sites and the oldest one on Standing Rock is known as Potts. This village is estimated to be between 11,000 and 14,000 years old. Because of the site's documents age and it is along the river, it is a vulnerable site. This site is layered upon previous villages spanning thousands of years so this draws serious looters. Most of our villages run along the bank of the Missouri River. Ensuring that these sites are protected and treated with respect consumes a lot of our time but there are also numerous sites within the interior of Standing Rock that require our attention as well. The elders that we rely on have shared knowledge and purpose regarding effigies and inlaid sites. Their construction was and is the foundation of our spirituality. The determination of our spiritual leaders has withstood hundreds of years of weather, cattle, looting and neglect. Our spiritual people made sure that they had left visual reminders of our obligations to ourselves as well as our people. The elders within our communities have helped the Tribal Monitors understand the history and the stories associated with each of these sites. With regards to documented effigies, we have three turtles, one salamander and five snakes. The 400 documented inlaid sites consist of constellations, ring sites, rattles, medicine wheels and sundials to name a few. All of these particular sites held powerful spiritual reminders for all that utilized them. They serve as markers of where we are spiritually and where we need to be. They are presently being cared for by family and tribal members, just as they had been for hundreds of years. They are fed and prayed with perpetuating the cycle of spirituality. The Tribal Monitors have documented 10 individual massacre sites. These sites don't contain one or two burials but hundreds. These sites are particularly vulnerable because of the documented notoriety. Documented massacres within Standing Rock include but are not limited to the Crow, Arikara and Sioux Bands. We as Tribal Monitors keep a close eye on these sites because they are river sites with easy accessibility. We have 40 documented burial sites and the largest is Rocky Ridge. This site contains over 1,000 burials spanning over two miles of interconnecting hilltops. Rocky Ridge is both powerful and spiritual and a constant reminder of why we as Tribal Monitors do what we do. Rocky Ridge has had minimal site damage either by cattle or looting and it is the most well preserved site on Standing Rock. Rocky Ridge defines what we do because of the magnitude of the site. Within Rocky Ridge there are burials, sundials, crescent moons representing fasting sites, there is a stone alignment encompassing a hilltop; although it is now partially intact, it remains a powerful symbol of determination. Four of the five snake effigies are found on Rocky Ridge. The snakes encompass the base of two hills and are facing each other. The snakes represent the animal nations. Rocky Ridge contains a wealth of history and spiritual information. All of our dinosaurs are located within Hell Creek Formation. Because of the isolation and the distance of these sites, it can take a day to go out and check and monitor them. Because of the badland type terrain, it is usually impossible to go out and check with a vehicle. It's more feasible to use ATV. Of the 2.3 million acres, less than two percent has been surveyed, so in regards to inventory we have taken and documented 1,155 sites."

Tim Mentz:

"The Tribal Monitors Program continues to be a growing tribal regulatory function for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Other tribes with a certified Tribal Historic Preservation Office are using their cultural knowledge to assist in the betterment of stewardship of their lands and sites and preserving and managing cultural and spiritual areas similar to how our ancestors once did. In our cultural resource code, the Tribal Monitors are the legal conduit representing the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer with federal agencies on federal undertakings. Within the Great Plains, the consistency of applying common law by these tribes with regulatory authority on these areas and the continued use of the natural laws of our grandmother by tribes have made federal agencies recognize the expertise of a tribal monitoring program and staff. Today, monitoring of significant cultural and spiritual areas is the only defense against looting and destruction of our cultural sites. With the identification of these sites, monitoring is the only practical way to manage these vulnerable areas. The tribal monitoring impact involving sacred and burial sites have been so great that the national policy has recently changed to adjust for more tribal involvement in management of areas significant to its people. We take pride in the fact that our program has shaped the way federal agencies are changing their management responsibilities with these areas. Because of this, we are sharing our procedural process with the other six tribes along the Missouri River to start a monitoring program this year. The regulatory authority and the jurisdiction of this office promotes good stewardship of ancient sites and allows for planned economic development in a structured process. The monitors locate and document areas significant to our tribes. Allowing our people to use spiritual areas long since standing idle has revitalized our youth and people to visit these areas. Numerous spiritual rides have taken our youth to visit these sites and to learn and understand how our ancestors once used these sites. Our spiritual riders are now making the annual Chief's Ride to include these particular areas that are very significant to our tribe. Tribes are taking control of lands within the reservations as old societies once did. These areas where our ancestors are buried and where they had their vision quests were protected by our warrior societies and were an important reason why the Indian wars occurred in the 1860s within the Great Plains and in other areas. Results of these violent wars against western expansion led to the treaty process for most tribes and the loss of using our spiritual areas' ancestral lands. With the Tribal Monitors Program expanding the responsibilities, the program has developed a plan and will create a stewardship program to put the elders, the youth, the spiritual practitioners back into the sacred areas of our reservation. [Lakota language]. 'One heart, one mind, one people.' That's our mission statement for our tribe and our office. [Lakota language]."

JoAnn Chase:

"Thank you so much. I have a great appreciation for the program. Certainly it has personal resonance for me as well as a member of the Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa Nation. I have a two-part question for you. The first part of the question has to do with what I think has been a really impressive building of relationships with a number of different entities including but not limited to some of those very federal entities and agencies which in large part have created some of the problems that you are addressing, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Forest Service and so on. I wonder if you might speak just a little bit more to how...what measures you have taken and what measures you will continue to take to really ensure the promotion and protection of and continuation of tribal sovereignty and of self determination, particularly with respect to building relationships with those agencies. That's the first part of the question. The second part of my question has to do with sustainability of the program, and I'm really pleased and honored to see your tribal chairman here, which I think is an important statement of support for the extraordinary work that you're doing. But I also know that sustaining this kind of work can be very challenging and that in large part you depend on a number of volunteers. And I'm wondering also if you would please just talk a little bit more about how...what challenges you might see and how if you...how you may address those challenges in sustainability and if in fact there are plans underway to increase even the tribal support for the program that's in place now."

Tim Mentz:

"Thank you for that question. It's one that's very rooted real deep into Indian Country. First of all, we're dealing with the common law system or the federal legislation and those enactments of laws that created if you will a shroud of uncertainty related to how a federal process or a legislative process could enhance or at least identify and address those types of areas that are most particularly sensitive to the tribes, and that's the spiritual aspect or the natural law system with that aspect of a site given within these areas. Historically, we've looked back at how we have managed to progress all the way up to 1978, where the American Indian Religious Freedom Act had shaped a different understanding from a federal perspective, particularly with federal agencies. Since that time, from 1978 until today, we still continue to struggle to educate the federal system and the federal process, particularly when they start asking questions like, 'Would you be able to give us more information? Would you give us and allow us to hear what your understanding and knowledge is in relation to this site that we're looking at?' And usually we have to separate the archaeological context of that question versus the natural law system or the system that we grew up with. Obviously we have people at our home reservations that have a different knowledge that's not paper-based or what we call a degree. So we have to separate those and have to educate the process in itself. The hurdles that we have taken, from 1978 until today, has led us to understand that we cannot quantify our spirituality. We can't quantify these certain areas that we say that are very significant to us. So it's been a long road in relation to all the federal agencies, particularly the federal land-managing agencies that can very well say that, 'You do not have a piece of paper to go along with what you're saying in relation to this site.' But we say from the other side that, 'Grandmother has taken us this far.' We understand the natural laws that come along with it bridging the culture and the language to these sites is what we promote. That does not mean that the federal process has a space for that, but now with an enactment of the NAGPRA, the Native American Grave Protection Repatriation Act, and the '92 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act has allowed us to progress to the point now where tribes are dealing with the federal agencies and we're stepping back also and looking at our people and saying, 'You know, how far do we go? How much knowledge, the sacred knowledge as we call it, do we divulge? Where's the fine line at? What can we document and what can't we document?' So those parts of that process has been included to get into what we call the consultation process of the federal system. The second part to your question is we have a number of elders, particularly our spiritual people that are now, we are setting them down and we're saying, 'Forgive us for asking these questions, but now the federal system has forced us to take a step forward and to address certain things that most generally we never talk about in public.' We don't divulge these types of sacred knowledge in public, but the question gets back to what I reiterated earlier, where's the fine line? So now we have our spiritual people actually stepping forward now and saying, 'Yes, maybe we're at the point now where we do have to document some of this knowledge that we have in order to protect these areas.' Until we can achieve that and that understanding from that perspective, it's growing now to the point that we want to have our children coming along with that process, with that discussion and now they're taking a step forward now with these youth rides, putting the horse back into these areas, putting that horse with the responsibility that leads with the horse and putting them back on the horse and getting back to the understanding of our warrior societies protected and fought these and they protected it very jealously, these types of areas. But now we're to the point, now it's the power of the pen and now bringing our spiritual people and our youth and elders together and now they're taking the point now where it's okay now to sit down and talk openly on our reservations now and talk about these things. So now we're pooling a lot of volunteers, particularly our elders that are stepping forward and saying, 'Yes, let's sit down and talk about these things,' and now creating a huge following that now is borne not only on leadership but the spiritual aspect."

David Gipp:

"One other question that I had. With what you're doing with the Tribal Monitors Program at Standing Rock, what other...how does this serve as a model for other tribes and I guess is there an effort, growing effort relative to other communities that you've had contact with on this kind of an effort?"

Tim Mentz:

"Yes, it has. Originally when we started talking about the 92 amendments we pushed for those types of procedures knowing that a procedural process has to be defined by tribes. Hence, we took those steps to know in the '92 amendments that it's okay to identify these people within the tribal structure to take steps similar to the National Historic Preservation Act that identifies Tribal Historic Preservation Officers that have [been] willing and have included in taking steps to do these types of areas and basically sit down with our people and say, 'Where are we going with this issue in relation to our cultural knowledge and our culture?' Hence that has broadened since the '92 amendments to include now that every reservation, particularly reservations, have a certain knowledge, a certain expertise and now we're bridging those gaps together and to form these types of collations and we're moving on a coalition right now in the Great Plains to gather all our cultural people and our cultural knowledge and now we have now affected and enhanced the process by bringing federal agencies and working collaboratively to educate them first off, but secondly to make them understand that we do have the expertise out there. Hence, programs are growing through the federal process, through the federal agencies that are recognizing our importance to the process, our cultural knowledge to the process, but more importantly the sustainability, that part of her question was, 'How do we sustain this process?' It's through our youth. We've got to put our youth back on the land. We have to put them back to the sites. We've got to let them take...walk off that black snake they call the pavement and they've got to walk over the hill. Hence, all these creations of these new programs that are happening on the reservations is a component that's going to not only enhance and enrich the process, but it's going to help us live on and bring those types of peoples together before that cultural knowledge is lost. Before our elders take it to the grave, we want to recapture it." 

Ron His Horse Is Thunder: The Keys to Effective Governance and Economic Development: Predictability and Sustainability

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Former Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Ron His Horse Is Thunder discusses why predictability and sustainability are so critical to effective Native nation governance and economic development.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

His Horse Is Thunder, Ron. "The Keys to Effective Governance and Economic Development: Predictability and Sustainability." Emerging Leaders seminar, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 11, 2007. Presentation.

"Now we are here learning about nation building and what really is nation building. You know as I sat down...I did not plan on actually taking part in listening to the sessions, but I'm glad I did. Because as I'm listening to and sometimes engaging in the sessions, I had for you, I had a prepared speech. And as I'm listening, I go, ‘That's something I can't tell them anymore. They already told them that. Okay, they told them that.' So I'm glad I listened. I hate being rhetorical. Sometimes it's good to hear things over and over again. It kind of embeds it in your mind. And so I'm going to do this off the cuff.

Now we're engaged in the idea, what does it truly mean, in terms of engaging in nation building? And I want to leave you with just two words -- if you leave here with anything -- and that's predictability and sustainability. Those two words. That's truly what we're about. As tribal nations, we were once just that. And they put on these reservations, they changed our form of government, and they created these tribal councils. And the tribal council powers were very limited in the beginning when they re-created us, if you will. And so tribal councils could do everything because they didn't have much to do. Now that's changed. As our nations have grown and we have exercised more sovereignty, what we do as tribal council members, as tribal leaders, becomes overwhelming at times, especially if we're going to stay in those traditional roles -- the traditional role being what the government gave us -- if we're going to stay in that role, the things that we do on a day-to-day basis are just going to overwhelm us. Because one of the things someone said, came to me -- and I read it in the book because I actually read that book. It says, ‘My constituents think I'm an ATM machine!' Well, that's because the traditional role, again for, as federal government has reshaped us. And I keep going back to that -- it's not tradition, it's a reformed government by the federal government. What tribal councils have been able to do again is very limited and they do everything in that limited context. And so our constituents have come to us consistently as tribal leaders, consistently saying, ‘You have the answers. You have all the power. You have control of the money.' And yes, tribal councils did, again to a limited basis. Bureau of Indian Affairs still handled many of those things; they handled all the leases. There were no corporate charters; they just brought somebody else from the outside. As we start to take over those responsibilities as tribal governments, we cannot allow ourselves to operate the old way.

And so part of these sessions is how do we then, with these new powers, if you will -- always were ours -- how do we in exercising these powers of tribal governments, how in exercising our sovereignty do we get away from the day to day, ‘I need, I need, I need, I need,' from our constituents? Well, we need to put in those places -- some of the things they talked about yesterday is constitutional development, the separation of powers; and that is the judicial branch, the legislative branch, and the executive branch. I think that was a fourth concept thrown in there -- some tribes use it -- and that is an elder's council. Something I learned; I might take that home with me. My tribe hasn't gotten to that point yet. My tribe did a separation of powers about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, something like that, and they separated out the judicial side of it. But the tribal council still held the hold of the legislative and the executive authorities, which really is a pain in my butt because they want to micromanage everything. And so we're here about learning to separate those out so that our nations become predictable. Because truly, if we're going to have sustainability, we can't depend on outside resources to continually take care of all of our needs, that is money. We all need money. And so in order to have sustainability on our reservations, we need economic development as we talked about this morning.

Economic development, in order for it to grow on our reservations, in order for it to be fostered by tribal governments, we need to put in place good laws. Part of those good laws is a separation of power. And so that legislative portion just writes the laws, the judicial portion just... and I shouldn't go into this. Now I'm becoming redundant in terms of what I already told you. But in order for us to be predictable, that's truly what businesses need, that's truly what an investor needs to bring money on to your reservation, bring employment, jobs, manufacturing -- whatever -- on to your reservation. Even your entrepreneurs, your tribal entrepreneurs need that stability. We talked about a lease in our last half hour and the idea of tribal government at a whim wanted to take away a lease. In order for anybody, whether it's an outsider or tribal member wanting to do economic development on your reservation, you need predictability. That's what laws are about, all laws are about predictability, whether it's creating safety -- criminal laws -- or whether it's civil regulation, it is about predictability and sustainability, protection of rights and delivery of services to our tribal members. So we -- if you leave here with anything, that what you're doing is creating a sustainable government that is very predictable. You need to absolutely be predictable, if anything else.

Now in terms of economic development, if you do your business code, your commercial code -- your uniform commercial code is what they'll say in law school more often than not -- you absolutely need to do that. If you haven't done that, I would advise you that's one of the things you need to take home with you is creating a business code, uniform commercial code, absolutely for predictability. Somebody invests their money, they're going to want to know how they're going to get their money back should everything go belly-up. And the tribe cannot -- here's one of the things my tribe has faced for the last 15 years that I've watched them as the tribal college president, is our tribe is so worried about sovereign immunity. They're so worried about controlling every aspect of business development on our reservation. They don't want any business to locate on our reservation unless they're willing to give up 51 percent ownership so the tribe can own it. They want to own everything. And I guess that's an okay thing if that's what your tribe wants to do. But most businesses don't want to locate from the outside in and have to give up 51 percent of their operation. And so you need to ask yourself, they said there were two forms of business development. One is large business development -- tribally owned businesses -- and entrepreneurs. Well, there's really another, third category I want to pose to you and that is large businesses locating in from the outside.

When we talk about entrepreneurs, we talk about small business and we really want to talk about people already on the reservation taking care of those C-stores, etcetera, etcetera. Questions tribal councils need to ask themselves is do they want to foster business development from large corporations outside? There's always a fear of that. There's a fear because of control. A real interesting concept that we have taken on and that is, for tribal, as tribal nations, as tribal governments, we have had so little control for so long of our lives, that the Bureau of Indian Affairs have controlled almost every aspect of who we are, that as we get control, as we start to exercise that sovereignty, we jealously guard it. We absolutely do. It's an okay thing. But sometimes it gets in the way of development; it gets in the way of sustainability. Yesterday, we talked about the idea of the Nez Perce. When the Nez Perce were fighting with their county commissioners; each of them vying for sovereignty, if you will, over this piece of land. And they worked it out and said, 'You know what, we understand that we're both sovereigns, but we need to work together.' And truly, when you start taking a look at attracting businesses – if that's what you're going to do – from the outside, large businesses from the outside, you have to be willing to say, ‘Okay, I'm a sovereign, but do I need to control 51 percent ownership of this business?' That's a decision your tribal council's going to have to make. I can tell you this: most businesses are not going to want to come, they're not going to. And so if that's the mode that your tribe's in, then you truly have to take a look at, okay, just tribal businesses, large tribal businesses, and you've talked about that this morning in terms of Lance Morgan and the Ho-Chunk, how they did that.

I want to talk to you then, a little bit about entrepreneurs on your reservation. And I know that some tribes, culturally speaking, frown upon it in terms of individual businesses. But I want you to think about this. That -- and Joan said it this morning or a roundabout way of saying it -- that is we were always business people, we just didn't call ourselves 'business people.' It's a foreign word to us. It's an English word. Truly there were people who possessed all kinds of skills. And not everybody was a good bow maker. Not everybody was a good, made good pottery. Not everybody knew how to train horses. Not everybody knew how to do everything. There were skilled craftsmen amongst our people who had a gift, if you will, and they would make beautiful pottery, but that's all they could do. So they would trade with somebody else and that person would trade with somebody else. Well, that's business. That is business. The only difference is you have a currency between today. That's the only difference. So we were always business people, always. And that's something we need to teach our young people, teach them in K-12 schools, that it's okay to be in business because we always were.

Now, we have to grapple with this concept of capitalism because businesses are associated with the word 'capitalism,' making profit, making huge profits, if you can. And I'm going to dive, I do this all the time, I go off into a tangent. We as Indian people don't grow up thinking, ‘I want to be a millionaire.' Rarely, rarely, rarely do you find an Indian who says that, ‘I want to be a millionaire.' And in high school says, ‘I want to be a millionaire.' In college says, ‘I want to be a millionaire.' And they go out and they start businesses to make lots of money. Most Indian business people don't have that mindset. Non-Indians, on the other hand, they have that mindset. That's the difference between us. But capitalism truly is the trades of goods and services for money and accumulation of wealth. So capitalism amongst Indians has a negative connotation to it. And therefore, businesses have a negative connotation to it. See, for so long, we have been shut out of business as Indian people. The only people that own businesses were non-Indians. And so when we look at business owners, ‘Oh, that's what white people do,' because we forgot that we were business people. Again, the only thing we need to grapple with is this idea of capitalism, that word, and that is the accumulation of wealth.

Well, I can almost guarantee you that in almost every Indian society, every Native culture, there were wealthy people and there were poor people. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong. But we had a way, we had a mechanism of dealing with it, and that is if you wanted to be tribal chairman or you wanted to be a politician, councilperson, you had to share your wealth; you had to share it. Taxation is a foreign concept to us. Why? Because our leaders provided for those people who didn't have, and there were always people who didn't have. So that's the only thing that we need to grapple with as entrepreneurs, is how do we become successful business people without having people label us as being greedy. That's something that you have to deal with as an entrepreneur. But understand truly, we were business people. There were rich people. There were poor people. One of the differences, and an old concept of doing things, again, the business people who were rich would have given out of their own pocket.

There is one...times change. Where we live changes, what's around us changes. One of the things that has changed, and we need to come to grips with this when we talk about business and capitalism, is that we, at one point in time, had unlimited resources. That as tribes, we defined our boundaries as being very expansive. Our boundaries [were] as far as we protect them. And every resource in it, in our territory, was ours. And so we, in essence, had unlimited resources and people could then acquire goods, lots of horses, have plenty of places to hunt and fish. And so our resources were unlimited. Having unlimited resources gave us unlimited wealth, only according to a person's ability was what limited our wealth, your abilities. Not resources, because they were all there. And that was how a businessperson was able to give it away because there was always more resources. Today they've confined us in a limited box called reservations and our sources  therefore ar, limited. And for a businessperson, to demand that a businessperson give all their wealth away is unrealistic, given limited resources.

And so we don't elect our officials to government anymore based on the amount they give away. We elect our leaders slightly differently now. Can they operate in this world around us? Can they deal with the state government? Can they deal with the federal government? Not can they accumulate wealth to give away to people, but can they effectively deal with county, state, federal governments? Can they do that? I spent all my life now going to school and learning how to deal with governments, etcetera, and have not ever gone into business. I don't have the resources now to give to all my tribal members. And so the tribe has to develop those resources to take the place of business people in the past who gave away their wealth. That truly needs to be the new model. And you need to teach that to your people. It's not the business people who must give away. Not to the point where they're broke or give everything else [away]. I would suggest that you, as you talk to people, talk to your entrepreneurs, tell them that they should give some of it away, because that's who we are. But we expect them to give everything away and they can't. They can't.

So we need to teach our people one, that we were always business people, we need to teach our people that entrepreneurs can't give everything away. As tribal governments, we need to develop laws and regulations that sustain, encourage, foster economic development for our people, and encourage businesses to come in from the outside as well, too, if that's what you want. You can tell them stay away and let the tribal government do all of that for you, that is the large businesses. But in terms of entrepreneurs, we need to foster that. The tribal government, as you've talked about this morning, really should...any small businesses they get into is going to compete against another tribal member or they're going to fail because they're too small of a business. You cannot run a country store 24 hours a day, seven days a week with a tribal government because you're going to have to pay someone overtime, comp time. An entrepreneur works 20 hours a day in order to make it succeed, and they don't get comp time, they don't get overtime, they don't get holiday pay. And so if you expect for small businesses to work, the only people you can really depend on is entrepreneurs. You can't depend on small business to be run by tribal government. It just won't work. And you've seen it fail many times on your own reservations. So you must encourage --if you're going to have this revolving money within your community and that's what you need to be sustainable. It's not just big businesses locating -- whether individual or privately owned or tribally owned -- not just big businesses but you need the entrepreneurs to make that money revolve. Because what will happen if you don't have the small entrepreneurs, what you're going to have is big businesses where everyone gets a paycheck and still runs off the reservation to spend all their money. That's what you're going to have. And as soon as the big business downsizes, you're going to lose all those jobs, you're going to have huge unemployment again, and you're not going to have any way of capturing the dollars that are already there.

One of the things I like to tell tribal governments is this: is you have millions of dollars on your reservation right now without doing any major industrial development, period. You do. Our problem is that we don't capture the dollars that are there. You don't necessarily have to bring a huge industry to have sustainable economies. You just have to capture the dollars that are there is what you need to do. BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], Indian Health Service, tribal government, public schools, all have capital coming in and dumping it on the table and employing people, and we don't capture it. And until you do that, you'll never have a sustainable economy. Never. You can bring in all the big business you want.

One of the cautions I have to you about bringing in businesses from the outside is, do not sell cheap labor and do not sell natural resources with the ideal that it's going to sustain your economy forever. It won't. Look at Kentucky who had lots of natural coal. That was a huge industry. They have massive unemployment in Kentucky. In Mississippi, they had huge labor pools. All those businesses are located offshore now because they can get their labor cheaper some place else. And so do not try to attract big business with the idea of cheap labor. They can find cheap labor someplace else, or natural resources. Again, sustainable economies on natural resources. Yes, you can use your natural resource. Yes, you can. But the ideal of sustainable economies for generations to come, sooner or later those resources run out and the jobs are gone and you have no sustainability. So that's what you're looking at from large industry, don't bank on it for generations. Back to the entrepreneur.

One of the examples I liked that Joan used was this. And that was, the lease that takes twelve months to get and then the tribal chairman has to sign it in the end -- I know because I have to sign every one of those darn things. And I keep telling myself, ‘Why am I wasting my time signing this? Hasn't somebody looked over this and looked over this and looked over this? And what am I supposed to do, double-check everything? No. I sign it.' Well that was an extra two days, because it sat in my inbox for two days before I ever got to it. But you should have a department that takes care of that, is what you need instead of the tribal council having to. First it has to go to the Econ Committee, they have to approve it. That took two weeks before it got on their agenda. Then it has to wait for the next month for the tribal council to handle it. 'Well, I don't like that person,' so send it back. Then it comes back to tribal council again, they approve it. Well then it has to be a resolution, recorder has to record it, write up a resolution, takes two weeks, gets on my desk, sits there for another two days, I sign it. Then it has to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. How long does it take them to get anything done?

So when you're talking about sustainability, you have to make it simplistic as well, too. And so we talked yesterday about the idea of the Swinomish, I believe it was, and the county and having to work out the land management plan and having both of those sovereigns have applications. And who do they use? Swinomish, because it was simpler, took less time. So as you take a look at developing laws for business development on your reservation, putting in the predictability portion of that -- that's what your laws are, your laws are the predictability portion of it. When you put in your predictability, make them simple. Otherwise, business will go some place else.

How many of you have TERO [Tribal Employment Rights Office] offices? Almost everybody should have a TERO office. You know, I never knew what the heck the TERO office did before I took tribal office. And then I find out that I'm also the chairman of the TERO commission. And I found out what TERO means. TERO is: To Employ Relatives Only. It's not supposed to mean that. It's not. Truly, it is about enforcement of our rights, hiring our people, and it is about sustainability. That is, you take that tax dollars, that TERO fee, and it shouldn't just sustain the TERO officers themselves, but also provide some training. So that those contractors, when they come in, can hire trained people; is what it's supposed to be about. I found out that we had a million dollars in TERO fees that were sitting there and tribal council members were giving it to Housing Improvement because their aunt had an application there. And that's how they were using the money. They were using it as a slush fund. They would take a little bit of that money and they would give it to a program when one of their friends, relatives, constituents complained about something. They'd say, ‘I just stuck $10,000 in there. Go over there and get some of that money.'

And then I found out that they all got paid stipend, a hundred dollar stipend for every meeting that they had. And I'm the chairman. So first thing I say is this, ‘No more stipends.' I missed the next meeting and I missed the next meeting after that and they paid themselves stipends. ‘Well,' they said, ‘the rules, the regulations say that we get stipends. So even though the chairman said we can't get it, we're going to get it because the rules say we can. By the way, we make the rules.' And I'm the only person on that TERO commission who's never accepted a stipend. I won't, but they all do. And then the other thing they were doing is really interesting. They were calling all kinds of special meetings and I wasn't notified. So finally I called the director and I said, ‘When are we supposed to have meetings?' ‘The first Monday of every month, Mr. Chairman.' I said, ‘okay. Let me know ahead of time. You've told me when it is, write everybody.' I said, ‘Nobody calls a special meeting unless it has my signature on it.' So far that's working. But I understood why they were calling all these special meetings. You get a hundred dollars every meeting and mileage. So they would meet for half an hour, half an hour, one issue. The next week, they'd do it again. And the next week they'd do it again.

So yeah, some of these things that come into play in terms of why do council people like to sit on boards. And so rules like that need to change and you need to put in it some predictability -- that once-a-month thing, only the chairman calls a meeting, etcetera. I want to get the heck off of it, I really do. I've got other things I need to do. But if you leave here with anything, remember that what you're here for and what you really should be trying to do at your home, is to change the laws so that you can have stable economies that are predictable so that you can protect the rights of your people and your nation and better serve your members. Thank you."

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

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honoring Nations: David Gipp: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

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

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

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

Amy Besaw Medford:

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

David Gipp:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges and Solutions to Keeping the Lakota Language Alive

Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

“There is more to an immersion school than simply bringing in elders and having them teach the children,” said Sunshine Carlow, education manager of Lakȟól'iyapi Wahóȟpi, the Lakota Nest Immersion School on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Rose, Christina. "Challenges and Solutions to Keeping the Lakota Language Alive." Indian Country Today. March 3, 2015. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/challenges-and-solutions-to-keeping-the-lakota-language-alive, accessed March 22, 2023)

As old ways faded on reservations, tribal power shifted

Author
Year

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

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

Resource Type
Citation

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

Judge: Tribal courts can incorporate culture, but need independence, due process

Author
Year

Tribal courts on the nation’s Indian reservations must make due process of law and independence hallmarks of their justice system, U.S. District Judge Ralph Erickson told a gathering of judges and other tribal court personnel in Grand Forks Thursday. Tribes can and should incorporate such Indian cultural traditions as “peacemaker courts” and “talking circles,” Erickson said, and those features should be respected by people outside the tribes...

Resource Type
Citation

Haga, Chuck. "Judge: Tribal courts can incorporate culture, but need independence, due process." Grand Forks Herald. June 20, 2013. Article. (http://www.crookstontimes.com/article/20130621/NEWS/130629909, accessed June 24, 2013)

Elderly Protection Teams Work to Stop Abuse

Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

While more than 30 tribal governments across the country have implemented elder abuse codes, some Indian communities and concerned citizens have taken a more proactive role to ensure these laws are enforced. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council started the first Elderly Protection Team in Indian country 25 years ago...

Resource Type
Citation

Rose, Christina. "Elderly Protection Teams Work to Stop Abuse." Indian Country Today. January 10, 2013. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/elderly-protection-teams-work-to-stop-abuse, accessed April 22, 2023)

Indian Pride: Episode 110: Indian Education

Producer
Prairie Public Broadcasting
Year

Indian Pride, an American Indian cultural magazine television series, spotlights the diverse cultures of American Indian people throughout the country. This episode of Indian Pride features David Gipp, President of the United Tribes Technical College, and focuses on the topic of Indian Education. (Segment Placement: 1:07 - 15:11)

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Topics
Citation

"Indian Education." Indian Pride (Episode 110). Prairie Public Broadcasting. Fargo, North Dakota. 2007. Television program. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH5a6SP80rE, accessed July 24, 2023).