Ian Record

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

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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.

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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.

Broken Government: Constitutional Inadequacy Spawns Conflict at San Carlos

Author
Year

This article, published in 1999, examined the governmental conflict taking place at the San Carlos Apache Tribe. It explored the historical constitutional roots of the conflict, specifically the ineffectiveness and culturally inappropriate Indian Reorganization constitution and system of government imposed upon the tribe by the U.S. government in the 1930s.

Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian. "Broken Government: Constitutional Inadequacy Spawns Conflict at San Carlos." Native Americas Journal. Spring 1999, 10-17. Article.

Permissions

This article, which appeared in the now-defunct Native Americas journal, is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of author Ian Record.

Pine Ridge Renaissance: From the Ground Up, Sovereignty Can Be Real

Author
Year

This article chronicles the groundswell of small business development taking place on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It examines the critical importance that citizen entrepreneurs can and do play in developing sustainable economies in Indian Country.

Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian. "Pine Ridge Renaissance: From the Ground Up, Sovereignty Can Be Real." Native Americas Journal. Spring 2003, 54-59. Article.

Permissions

This article, which appeared in the now-defunct Native Americas journal, is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of author Ian Record.

Per Capita Distributions of American Indian Tribal Revenues: A Preliminary Discussion of Policy Considerations

Year

This paper examines policy considerations relevant to per capita distributions of tribal revenues. It offers Native nation leaders and citizens food for thought as they consider whether or not to issue per capita payments and, if they choose to do so, how to structure the distribution of funds and make that distribution serve tribal goals. We describe this as a "preliminary discussion" because it represents only the first stage of an ongoing research project examining tribal per capita distribution policies and their effects.

Resource Type
Citation

Cornell, Stephen, Miriam Jorgensen, Stephanie Carroll Rainie, Ian Record, Ryan Seelau, Rachel Rose Starks. "Per Capita Distributions of American Indian Tribal Revenues: A Preliminary Discussion of Policy Considerations." Published for the 2007 National Congress of the American Indians Annual Convention. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 2007. Paper.

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.

Ian Record: Constitutional Reform: Some Perspectives on Process

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Dr. Ian Record, NNI Manager of Educational Resources, provides a broad overview of the inherent difficulties involved with constitutional reform, the different processes that Native nations are developing to engage in constitutional reform, and some of the effective reform strategies that NNI is encountering through its work with Native nations in this area. He also discusses the appropriate roles that attorneys and legal advocates should play in the reform process.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Record, Ian. "Constitutional Reform: Some Perspectives on Process." Indigenous Peoples' Law and Policy Program, James E. Rogers College of Law, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 15, 2014. Presentation.

“The reality is that in the era of nation building, the era of tribal self-determination, what we’re seeing is a growing number of nations realizing that if they want to fully exercise their sovereignty, if they want to fully exercise their jurisdiction, if they want to be serious about tribal self-determination and self-governance, they have to look first and foremost at the constitutional basis of their governance systems and once...when they do that, what a great number of them are finding is that the constitutions that they have for a variety of reasons aren’t theirs, were imposed upon them by outsiders, typically the federal government through the Indian Reorganization Act, through the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act and other types of legislation and acts. And what they’re finding is that they don’t own them, they’re not theirs, they don’t make sense to them culturally, and also in many cases, they don’t meet the challenges of the day. They’re very structurally weak, they’re ill equipped to enable Native nations to achieve their goals, to negotiate the complex governance challenges that they face in the 21st century.

And so what we do at the Native Nations Institute is we spend quite a bit of our time working directly with a growing number of native nations, in particular in the region of North and South Dakota and Minnesota in this realm of governance reform and specifically constitutional reform. So often we are called to come in, and at the very beginning of a process, when the nation may just have come to the decision that we’re going to tackle this constitutional reform challenge. And often we’re brought in after a reform process has failed. Often we’re brought in to help a nation design a citizen education campaign around a new constitution that they’ve already created. So what we’ve been in the great position to do is to really see at various stages of the constitutional reform process what is working and what isn’t.

So what I wanted to talk about today, to spend a little bit of time on, is what we’ve learned when it comes to not so much what kinds of constitutional changes that tribes are making, but more how they’re doing it. Because fortunately or unfortunately, what we’re seeing is there’s a lot more nations that recognize that they need to make constitutional change happen than are actually doing that constitutional change because it’s an incredibly difficult process. And it’s often difficult for the very reasons that I already talked about, these legacies of colonialism, which I’ll get into in a little bit.

So here’s some of the outcomes that we see, and this is sort of done in conversational style, but we see a variety of outcomes when it comes to nations engaging in constitutional reform. Some actually succeed. Some actually succeed to the scope and to the degree to which they actually embarked upon.

So they say, ‘Well, at the beginning of the process we’ve decided we’re going to get rid of this constitution we have because for the reasons I put out it doesn’t make sense to us, it doesn’t meet our needs and they actually succeed in developing an entirely new constitution. Other say, ‘Well, yeah, I guess you could say we succeeded, but we only did minor changes. We didn’t do nearly as much as we had hoped to do because perhaps some of the bigger changes were too controversial, our people weren’t ready to really accept what a major change in a particular area was going to mean so we kind of...we did the easy stuff. We did the more pro forma stuff.’

Sometimes we hear tribes say, ‘Well, we completed reform but our citizens didn’t really have a full sense of ownership in the process and they didn’t really care what the outcome is and things are sort of proceeding as they did before.’ And that’s a real dangerous place that you don’t want to be in as a Native nation.

Sometimes we see tribes say, ‘Well, we completed reform, but the community is now only more divided than it was before. We engaged in this process because there was division within the community, there was a lot of factionalism going on, we felt that at the root of that factionalism was our governance system and the inherent inadequacies in it, but this reform we’ve engaged in has actually made things worse.’

Often we hear this, ‘Our process started and then it stalled.’ And there is a variety of reasons we see for that. I’d say the biggest one probably is the political turnover challenge. Often, in these nations that are wrestling with constitutional reform, if you look at for instance the standard boilerplate IRA (Indian Reorganization Act) constitution system of government, you have two-year, non-staggered terms of elected office. So if you think about that, you have a very small window. If you have a group of leaders that decide, ‘We want to push constitutional reform, maybe that was the platform we ran on our campaign and we really feel like we’ve got this short window to do this,’ and if you’re thinking about two-year, non-staggered terms, you’re looking at maybe 12 months of real meaningful work that you can do before it’s time to get ready for re-election and try to run on some sort of platform of progress.

And then often we see, ‘We can’t even get the process started.’ And in these instances typically what it is is there’s widespread recognition in the community, there’s widespread recognition among elected leadership, there’s widespread recognition among people working in tribal government that, ‘The system we have is not working. We can’t make this work, we can’t move forward as long as we have it, but we can’t seem to get off the mark in terms of figuring out how to actually change it.’ So these are just some of the common outcomes.

So why is it so difficult? Constitutional change is difficult everywhere. If you look at a lot of the examples coming out of Africa for instance in the last 20, 30 years, if you look at those former Eastern European Soviet Union block countries that got out of the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union fell apart, they’ve been struggling for the past 30 or so years trying to figure out, ‘What’s going to be the constitutional basis of our government?’ And there were a number that simply pulled one off the shelf and they very quickly found that, ‘It’s not working for us. We’ve got to develop something that is ours, that makes sense to us.’ So it’s difficult everywhere.

The legacies of colonialism complicate it. Often the very policies that nations are trying to get out from under by engaging in constitutional reform are the actual things that hinder constitutional reform, things like I just mentioned, these short, non-staggered terms of elected office. Often in these nations you have a lack of separations of powers, division of responsibilities, so you can have one leader or a couple of leaders just say, ‘If we’re not buying into this process, we can derail the whole thing,’ because they have that much power and authority. So the legacies of colonialism complicate it.

Time is often short. I mentioned that. And I wanted to share this example with you and this is in your packet here. This is...I actually took this screen capture. This is from an email that we got from a tribe that we’ve been working with on and off for the last several years. They were basically emailing us asking us to provide them assistance and this is what they laid out as their timetable for starting a constitutional reform process and actually having a new draft constitution in hand, upon which time they could have their citizens vote on it. This is a nation with more than 13,000 citizens, spread out all over the place. More than half of them live off reservation.

So they had it in mind, the particular elected leader who was leading this initiative, had it in mind that between early May and mid-June, roughly six weeks, that they would initiate a constitutional reform process with an initial training of their leadership followed by a community forum to discuss and review the current constitution, a team meeting to draft the new constitution, a community forum to review that draft and offer any feedback, and then the presentation of a petition and proposed revised constitution for signatures at general council to basically put it up for election. All this they were going to do within six weeks, an entirely new constitution.

And what we responded to them was, we said, ‘You need to take a step back and take a deep breath and think about what you’re trying to accomplish. You’re trying to essentially revolutionize your entire system of governance in six weeks, a system of governance that your people has lived with for the entirety of most people’s lifetimes on the reservation and you’re going to give your community, your citizens, one opportunity really to express their will about what they want to see in a constitution and then one opportunity to respond to how they think they see their will captured in that document. And also they have to be physically present and there’s only going to be one chance each time. So if you’ve got a schedule conflict that day, too bad, you had your opportunity.’

So this is the sort of thing we sometimes see nations struggle with because this elected leader says, ‘If I don’t get this done during my term in office, then it’s not going to happen. So I’ve got to sort of build this artificial timetable that does not allow for the people to gain ownership in the process.’ And often really that’s at the root of the problem in many of these constitutions is the people don’t own it. They don’t feel it’s theirs, they don’t believe in it and they don’t believe in the system of government that the constitution creates and so they tend to try to rip off that government for everything it’s worth instead of actually supporting it and supporting the elected leaders who are elected to lead it. So time is often short, that’s a huge challenge.

Cultural match, which is one of the NNI research findings. That is often very difficult to achieve because it’s very difficult to go back to the way things were 150, 200 years ago. What I often stress when I work with tribes in this area is you need to go back and understand how your nation governed itself before the legacies of colonialism began to have an impact, federal policies began to have an impact. What was your nation’s constitution, written or unwritten? What was it? How did the people actually organize to get things done, to sustain the life of the nation? And then also how did your nation’s current constitution come to be? Because those are tools, those are informational tools that nations need as they begin this...to engage this question of reform.

And then another challenge of why reform is so difficult is that you’re not reforming your constitution sort of in isolation. You’ve got to do it with some thought about, ‘How do we relate with other governments? How do we relate with the United States government?’ And what’s really cool is what we’re seeing is we’re seeing a growing number of nations for instance that are removing any reference to the United States in their constitutions, they’re removing any reference of the U.S. Secretary of Interior and their ability to approve changes to the constitution within that constitution. So it is a difficult challenge.

So here’s some other reasons that we’ve encountered. There’s not enough citizen education. And this is really an inherent issue that is larger than simply the constitutional reform process that many nations try to engage in. Often they’re starting at a deficit because they don’t...there isn’t in the community a tribal civics education taking place where young people in the community are learning about how their people governed themselves traditionally, how their current government works, what their current constitution says, they’re not learning that. And so you’re sort of starting with a knowledge gap in many Native communities that is difficult to overcome and really takes a lot of forethought. And that sort of is a bigger challenge than simply saying, ‘Okay, we want to change the constitution.’ If you’re engaging your people about that question, first they have to understand, ‘Well, what are we starting with? What are we starting with? You’re asking us to consider changing something, we don’t even know what that something is.’

So often that’s an issue. Often there’s not enough citizen participation and ownership. It’s that example I just showed you. ‘Eh, we’ll give our citizens one shot at the apple and after that we’ve at least given them the opportunity and then we’re going to move forward.’

And then there’s this question of politics. Reform has to start somewhere and typically it’s going to start with one group of leaders, elected leaders, who are saying, ‘We think this is important. We think if the nation’s going to move forward we’ve got to go down this constitutional reform road.’ No matter what, there’s going to be some in the community that’ll say, ‘Well, this is their political agenda. They’re not doing this on the nation’s behalf. They’re doing this for their own political gain.’ So there’s sort of an inherent distrust and often it’s, again, this is one of the many ‘Catch 22s’ in this area, often the distrust of government in many of these communities has been exacerbated over the decades by the fact that they have a weak constitution. And so when these nations or these leaders say, ‘Well, we need to strengthen our constitution,’ that’s when that distrust tends to rear its ugly head.

And then there’s just simply fear of change. Fear of change. Like I mentioned, in many communities there’s a widespread recognition that the constitution and system of government they have is not adequate, it’s not appropriate, but at the same time a lot of those people feel very comfortable with the way things are. It’s not the best it could be, but they’re comfortable with it, they know how it works, they know the system and if you come to them and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to turn this thing completely upside down on its head and we’re going to create an entirely new governance reality,’ that’s pretty scary for folks.

And there’s parallels around the world. Just look at like the Affordable Care Act. That was a major change in terms of how the government, how the U.S. government serves the U.S. citizens. Basically saying, ‘We’re getting into the health care field. We’re going to get more forcefully into this area.’ That was a huge change and a lot of people still aren’t satisfied with it.

So here are some strategies we’ve come across. We’ve seen tribes tend to be more successful with constitutional reform when they think really hard at the outset about who is going to be in charge of the process. Who is going to be in charge of the process? And we’ll get more into that. They think long and hard about, ‘What are the best ways we can educate our nation’s citizens,’ and this is really critical. That ‘s’ is underlined for a reason. Tribes tend to be more successful when they develop a multi-faceted approach to citizen education and engagement. So basically they do much more than that example I showed you where they just said, ‘Well, we’re going to have a community meeting. We’ll make sure it’s well publicized. Whoever shows up, shows up and whoever doesn’t show up, you had your chance.’

Well, we’ve seen nations like White Earth for instance, who recently went through the development of a new constitution up in Minnesota, who said, ‘We understand our people. We understand the different ways they learn. We’re going to try to develop multiple pathways by which our citizens can learn about and contribute to the development of this new constitution. It’s going to be several cycles of community meetings held in different locations where we know our people live, whether it’s on reservation or off. We’re going to have a website specifically dedicated to this process where we have things like explanatory videos that discuss key aspects of the new constitution, etc. We’re going to be active on social media because we know that’s how young people access information.’ So a multi-faceted approach to educate and engage the nation’s citizens about this critical topic.

And then culturally appropriate methods, culturally appropriate methods. So for instance Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a Pueblo nation in Texas that I’ve been working with, they’ve incorporated, they don’t have a written constitution, but one of the things they’re engaged in is redefining their citizenship criteria, which you could argue is a major constitutional change because they’re changing how they’re constituting themselves by seemingly...it looks like they’re going to be abandoning blood quantum and moving to lineal descent. So that’s a major constitutional change.

Well, what they’ve been doing is they’ve been incorporating their citizen education and engagement strategies into their existing cultural activities. So for instance, I think it’s every three months they have what’s called a ‘Pueblo Junta,’ which is basically a large gathering of all the community members and that’s where they’re updating citizens on what they’ve been learning about -- the surveys they’ve been doing of community members, engaging them, getting their feedback and so forth.

So where we see nations really say, ‘What’s appropriate for our people culturally?’ For instance, ‘If we’re really serious about engaging our elders, what’s the most culturally appropriate way to do that? What’s the most culturally appropriate way to get their input on what we want the new constitution to look like?’ So we’ve seen that bear some good fruit.

Where we’ve seen tribes stumble is when councils dominate the process. It gets back to that politics challenge. You don’t want your elected leaders seeming like they’re at the helm of the reform process. That’s not to say they don’t have a critical role to play in sort of setting up the process through, for instance, enabling legislation. They could pass enabling legislation that actually formally creates a constitutional reform body and then make sure that that constitutional reform body has a life that transcends any single administration or any single term in office. But it’s really a supportive role. Where we’ve seen tribes be successful is when they set up an independent constitutional reform body. It can be a commission, a convention, a committee -- whatever you want to call it. The name doesn’t really matter. It’s the independence that matters, the independence of that entity that matters.

And we’ve seen tribes take a variety of approaches to this. Tribes are really being innovative in terms of how they’re making sure that this constitutional reform body is representative of the entire nation because they understand that at the end of the day, if this reform process is going to be successful, it needs to have the trust of the people and the ownership of the people or else the outcome won’t matter. And so they’re saying, ‘Well, how do we achieve that?’

Well, for our nation it might be, ‘Let’s do it by district. Let’s do it by political district because that makes sure that...that ensures that we have...every district will have representation.’ Or they might say, ‘Well, let’s do it by demographics. We want to make sure we have a young person on there. We want to make sure we have an administrative, bureaucrat type from tribal government on there who can sort of bring that perspective. We want to make sure we have an elder on there. We want to make sure we have an off-reservation citizen on there. We want to make sure that we have somebody who’s a descendent of a tribally enrolled citizen, but may not actually be a citizen of the nation because one of the things we’re thinking about doing is reforming our citizenship criteria and if we do that, that person would then become a citizen of the tribe. So we want that perspective as well.’

So there’s a variety of ways that nations are approaching this representation issue, but ultimately what it needs to be is independent. It needs to have that sort of stand-alone...that stand-alone persona in the community where the average Joe Citizen will look at that reform body and say, ‘Okay, this is not the creature of the council or this particular elected leader. This has its own force to it that is independent and distinct from the current holders of political authority.’ And it’s got to be well funded and it’s got to be respected.

What we’ve seen in some instances is nations will do a really good job of this kind of stuff, the independence questions, the representation question, and then they get down here and they say, ‘Well, we didn’t really have a lot of money for this.’ When what we’ve seen, where these efforts tend to be successful, they take two, three, four, five, six, seven years. They take an extraordinary amount of research, meetings, sometimes travel, sometimes these nations are sending delegations to other tribes who’ve undergone reform and learning from them. So this can get pretty costly and a lot of it depends on how big the tribe is, how many of their citizens they’re trying to reach and get engaged in this.

And then it has to be respected. It has to be respected. Unfortunately what we’ve seen is in some instances tribal leaders will pay lip service to the fact that, ‘Yeah, we’re for constitutional reform. We’ve set up this commission,’ and then they’re out at the powwow and they’re chatting up their buddies, they’re bad mouthing the commission’s work and basically that begins to derail the process because people begin to think, ‘Well, if the leadership really isn’t truly behind this, why should I be?’ So that issue of respect is absolutely critical.

I kind of covered this already about this question of legitimacy of this reform commission, of this reform body. One leader of a nation we’ve worked with in this area said, ‘We went into this process with the very explicit thought in mind that we wanted to have this commission maintain an aura of independence,’ was the term they used. An ‘aura of independence.’ That it’s separate and distinct from sort of the normal political back and forth of the day. That this was going to be about the nation and not about faction A versus faction B.

So here’s some just responsibilities that we see these members, whoever ultimately serves on this commission, what we see as some of their key responsibilities. One of the things we really impress upon tribes... And again, it’s hard for tribes to get outside of their own box, to kind of get their head out of their own issues, their own constitutional problems and say, ‘Well, what could we learn from other nations?’ And so what we really impress upon the nations we work with on this is, ‘Go out. Learn from other tribes. Yeah, we can tell you a little bit about what Tribe A did and Tribe B did and Tribe C did, but you could learn a lot more yourself by going and learning from them directly.’ And it’s not to say you go out and you meet with them and you learn from them and you just simply take everything that they’ve done and you implement it wholesale in your nation, but you may learn a lot of valuable lessons about process, you may learn a lot of valuable lessons about the particular types of constitutional changes that those other nations made and why they made them, and are they working or are they not working. But again, that kind of thing takes funding so you’ve got to think about that up front.

They developed drafts of constitutional changes for feedback and this is critical -- drafts plural, drafts plural. The constitutional drafting process is not a one-shot deal. We’ve seen tribes tend to be more successful when they go into it thinking, ‘We’re going to keep drafting and redrafting and redrafting and redrafting until we get this right because it gives us an opportunity to continually, again and again, solicit the citizens’ thoughts, capture their will on this issue and then incorporate it into this document.’

And part of the...I touched on the citizen education challenge a little bit more, but where we see tribes focus a lot of their energy is trying to help the people understand the answers to these questions. They need to understand that the average Joe Citizen who’s maybe a single mom with three kids, just struggling to put food on the table, get propane in the winter, that kind of stuff, you’re asking them to care about the constitution. You’ve got to make the argument, ‘This will improve your life. This will improve the life of your children and their children.’ And you really need to then educate them about what role does the constitution play in the lives of the people, because if you’re not making that argument, then you’ve lost them even before you get out the door. And then you’ve got to say, ‘Well, if we change the constitution, here’s how we think it will benefit you. Here’s how we think it will strengthen your role as citizen of the nation.’ And here are some of the things we see them focusing on in terms of explaining the purpose of this to the people.

And we see them adopt a number of really interesting strategies. We’re seeing...I’ve been working a lot with the tribal colleges across the country in getting them to use our online curriculum and what we’re seeing is a proliferation in recent years of tribal government classes, of history classes specifically about that nation’s government and that nation’s constitution. We’re seeing some tribes really use their media outlets, whether it’s their newspaper, their tribal newspapers, their tribal radio stations, they’re using them to great advantage.

For instance, one woman I know, she’s from one of the Dakota tribes and she’s got a radio show and she’s on the constitutional reform committee. And so each week she does about 30 minutes on the nation’s constitution and she interviews people on the constitutional reform committee and has them provide updates on where the conversation is on the new constitution and so forth. That’s a really good example. And there’s a lot of tribes that have their own radio stations or at least have access to airtime on radio stations that they don’t own.

Youth councils is another emerging trend we’re seeing. Nations really thinking, ‘This challenge of rebuilding our nation, it’s not going to happen overnight. It didn’t take us a year to get to where we’re at. It’s not going to take a year to change things for the better, so we’ve really got to view this as a long-term proposition. And if we’re going to be serious about nation rebuilding, about making...building a stronger government that is more culturally appropriate, we’ve got to start young. We’ve got to start with our young people.’ So just here in Arizona, there’s some of the most innovative, award-winning tribal youth councils anywhere in Indian Country. Gila River, Tohono O’odham, some really good examples there.

So here’s what we sometimes see and this is an unfortunate thing. And again I think, as we move forward, I’ll talk a little bit more of where we see the role of lawyers, of attorneys, in the constitutional reform process. But this is something really important to keep in mind that you really have to have the citizens on board before the constitutional reform train leaves the station or you could end up with a situation where reform fails and you have your citizens even more apathetic about government, even more alienated, and that’s not where you want to be. Particularly when you embark on constitutional reform, it’s often to improve or strengthen the relationship between citizens and government. Often constitutional reform is attempted precisely because people in positions of authority and of leadership realize that ‘our people are completely disengaged and at the root of that disengagement is this inadequate constitution we have.’

So here’s some reasons why people won’t participate and why the citizen engagement challenge is so difficult. I’ll talk about this. I sort of touched on this. Often people just say, ‘I’m too busy. I’ve got too much going on. I don’t have time to deal with this.’ And so where we see tribes succeed is where they recognize early on that, ‘We can’t expect the people to come to us; we’ve got to go to them. We’ve got to go to them.’ As the leader of one nation that we work with said, ‘If your entire constitutional reform process is predicated on the flyer approach, then you’re dead before you even begin because where you’re simply posting flyers saying, ‘Come to this meeting about constitutional reform,’ nobody shows up and you said, ‘Well, they had their chance,’ that’s not good enough. You’ve got to go to them.

‘It’s not my constitution.’ I don’t know how many of you guys read Indianz.com on a regular basis or Indian Country Today. I don’t know how many of you’ve been following the saga up at Blackfeet. But they are...I was just reading a story today and that refrain was coming out again and again and again. ‘Why are we even dealing with this constitution? It’s not ours. Why are we even abiding by these rules? They’re not ours.’ And so I think again that’s where that history piece is so critical, is people need to really understand sort of the detail of that. ‘Well, yeah, you understand it’s not yours, it was something that was imposed upon you, but what does that mean? What does that mean for how you actually go about changing it? And if it’s not yours, then what would be yours?’ Because often, there’s not a lot of conversation about that. There’s a sense of, ‘Well, we know that’s not our government, we don’t believe in it and we understand that’s at the root of our dysfunction,’ but there’s less conversation about, ‘Well, what is ours? What is our constitution if this is not our constitution?’

‘It doesn’t impact my life.’ You could ask any average American citizen that and that would probably be what they would say about the U.S. Constitution. ‘It doesn’t impact my life.’ Sure it does, just not in a way they can readily see. So again, that’s part of the citizen education and engagement challenge is you’ve got to educate people about how it does in fact impact their life.

‘I don’t trust the process. I don’t trust the process.’ And I want to focus on two things here. Sources of mistrust, one of them is commonly dominance of lawyers in the process. How many of you guys like reading constitutions? Come on, raise your hands. Ray, you like reading constitutions? Nobody likes reading constitutions, right? Even you lawyers to be, not really a lot of fun to read constitutions. Imagine your tribal citizens, your average tribal citizens who may have a tenth-grade, twelfth-grade, maybe a tribal college...a couple years of tribal college education. When lawyers tend to dominate the process, the accessibility of the conversation about constitutions tends to be way above their heads. And so we see a lot of mistrust bubbling up when the lawyers are sort of front and center in the reform process from start to finish.

I’ll give you a good example of this and I may have shared this at the seminar. I was actually teaching with some of my colleagues at an executive education seminar with a tribe who has sort of the boilerplate IRA constitution, system of government-style tribe. We had these lawyers show up to this seminar during the second day and they said, ‘If you have some time at the end of your agenda, we’d like to have the floor so we could talk to the elected leadership and community members and some of the key decision makers,’ that were assembled there in the room. And so we did and they actually got up and they said, ‘Well, we’ve been working on this new draft constitution for the tribe and we got it all done. Here it is. It’s all finished. We want to just give you a quick overview of it.’ And before they got more than about 20 or 30 more words out of their mouth, they got shouted down by the people in the room because nobody knew they were even working on this draft constitution. And so there was no ownership in it and the people that had assembled in the room didn’t even care what was in it, it didn’t matter because it was sort of a done deal. And the feeling was, ‘Well, you’re showing us that this constitution’s a done deal and we weren’t even consulted on it. How dare you.’

And so the ways to overcome, some of the ways to overcome that mistrust is transparency, transparency and transparency. You have to expect that the lawyers are going to respond to the community needs and concerns instead of expecting the community to follow the lawyer’s lead. And what’s absolutely critical is that you create a safe environment for real dialogue. And again this comes back to the role of elected leaders. If you’ve got your elected leaders at every single community meeting about the constitution, about the drafting of a new constitution, and you’ve got a bunch of people that care about this new constitution and they really want to share their thoughts and feelings, but the last time they did it in front of an elected leader they lost their job or something like that, you’ve got to question, ‘Do we really have a safe environment for real dialogue?’ And the elected leaders have to think, ‘Well, me even being here, not even saying anything but me even being present at a community meeting about a new constitution, is that appropriate? Is that going to stifle real dialogue? Is that going to stifle frank input from our citizens who we really need their input if we’re going to have a constitution, a new constitution that is going to have the ownership of the people in it?’

So I want to spend a couple more minutes about some of the things I think that you as attorneys to be need to think about when it comes to tribal constitutional reform and the process by which tribes engage in constitutional reform. Because I would imagine that at some point in your careers -- as I mentioned at the outset -- at some point in your careers you’re going to get involved in a constitutional reform process or you’re going to be engaged on a constitutional question or you’re going to be asked to review the constitutionality of something, of a tribe’s constitution, and that could be in the constitution, it could be in its codes, it could be in resolutions or something.

And I thought this...I wanted to share this quote with you because I thought that it’s very telling. One of our colleagues was having a conversation with the leader of a nation who was engaged in reform and he said that, ‘The law comes from the constitution, therefore the lawyer should come after the constitution.’ I thought that that’s a very telling quote because what you want to think about as an attorney and as a lawyer is, ‘What is my role in assisting a nation in developing a constitution, implementing that constitution, living with that constitution, interpreting that constitution,’ it needs to be a supportive role. It needs to be an advisory role, not so much a creative role.

So one of the things to think about in terms of the appropriate role of lawyers in the reform process is to become an expert on tribal constitutional reform. And there’s a couple threads here that I think you should think about. The first is, have a sense of the landscape. What are tribes doing in the area of constitutional reform across Indian Country? What are the major trends that they’re showing as they develop new constitutions, ratify constitutional amendments, etc.? Where are they focusing their activity, their energy? Things like separations of powers, which is an Indigenous concept. Re-instilling that back into their governance systems. Things like removing the Secretary of Interior approval clause from their constitutions, where if a tribe wants to change its constitution, amend its constitution, it has to go get Secretary of Interior approval to do that. A lot of tribes are just saying, ‘Let’s get that out of the equation. We’re going to amend our constitution to take that out.’

It’s things like strengthening justice systems. And as lawyers who are going to be probably dealing in that realm quite a bit of tribal justice systems, it’d behoove you to know, what are tribes doing in this area to strengthen their justice systems? How are they doing it? How many tribes are bestowing upon their appeals court or their supreme court the ability to review the constitutionality of legislation that the tribe ratifies, that the council passes? So become an expert in tribal constitutional reform. And I would argue also become an expert on...if you envision yourself -- whether you’re an attorney general or maybe you’re a lawyer that’s on retainer with the tribe or maybe you’re consulting a number of tribes -- become an expert on what’s the oral history, what’s the record of that nation’s constitutional reform and that nation’s current constitution because often there’s a lot more in the back story to that nation’s constitution than what’s written on the page. Because you might read a provision that says, ‘Well...’ that articulates a separation between the executive and the legislative and it may be a bit innovative in how it words it, but that doesn’t give you enough to go on. You might need to understand, ‘Well, why did they decide to take that approach to that separations of powers question?’ And so learn what you need to learn to understand how that constitution and specific provisions within it came to be.

Help to fine-tune the final constitutional language. So for instance, there’s one tribe we’re working with right now and what they’re moving towards through their citizen engagement process on constitution reform is they’re envisioning, ‘At the end of the day we’re going to end up with basically a terms sheet.’ It’s basically going to be in very layman’s terms, ‘Here are the dozen or maybe two dozen key things we want to see in our new constitution. We want it to protect the language and preserve the language of the people, the native language of the people,’ or something like that. ‘We want a clear and distinct separations of powers between the executive branch, the legislative branch,’ whatever that might look like, whatever it might be. So there might be sort of layman’s terms-style provisions that then need to be taken by a lawyer who understands the legal language that might...that might be the role for you is, ‘How do we fine tune this?’ Another thing is to provide advice as to the legality of the new constitutional amendments. Because often constitutional amendments, if they’re not worded correctly, they might conflict with other laws that the nation has on the books. They might conflict with the actual constitution. An amendment might actually conflict with the rest of the constitution. So that might be a role that you as a lawyer could play.

Help the nation navigate the secretarial election process. So for a lot of nations, as I mentioned, who have that language in their constitutions that says, ‘If we want to change our constitution, we have to have the Secretary of Interior approve it.’ You actually have to go through a secretarial election. It’s an incredibly complex, thorny process and that’s where an attorney can play a role to say, ‘Okay, how do we navigate this process. Maybe there are other nations who’ve recently gone through this. I can call up their attorney and say, ‘What worked for you, what didn’t? How do we streamline this process? Are there certain people at the Bureau that I need to talk to who will be responsible on this thing so we can move this thing forward so our people aren’t waiting 18 months to get an election on something they already agreed to at the tribal level”?’

One of the key areas is you’d advise a nation on, ‘How do you actually implement this constitution?’ Because often these new constitutions or these constitutional amendments will mandate the creations of bodies of law by which those constitutional provisions are then enacted and it might be your role to say, ‘Okay, well, here’s how we actually implement these changes. We need to create laws for this and laws for that. We need to reconcile these conflicting laws we have or else we can’t fully enact this particular provision.’

And then you have to understand how the changes that the nation is either contemplating or the ones they’ve already made, what is it going to mean for how the nation can now exercise its jurisdiction and sovereignty? Because often if you look at some of these IRA constitutions, they’re very, very limited. They have a very limited conception of the nation’s sovereignty and suddenly when that nation then creates a new constitution, it really argues for a much broader, much fuller expression and exercise of sovereignty. So in your role as legal advisor, you’ve got to think, ‘Well, what does that mean in terms of how we deal with other governments, how we deal with private parties for instance? How does that...what does that mean we have to develop in terms of law? Does this mean we structure our contracts differently?’ So there’s this huge ripple effect that comes from constitutional change where the attorneys are going to be front and center.

So here’s some other things we’ve seen when it comes to constitutional conventions and public hearing processes. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on this but...one of the things I wanted to mention briefly is that it’s important for nations who are going down this constitution reform road to not automatically treat it as a one-shot deal. Often because of those political pressures, often because of the short-term windows, there’s a sense of urgency, there’s a sense of...and often it’s because of responding to crisis. There’s this sense of, ‘We’ve got to get it all done at once. We’ve only got one shot at the apple on this. We’ve got to collapse absolutely everything into this constitutional reform process that we’re currently engaged in. It’s basically an all-or-nothing proposition.’ And where that can really handicap tribes is almost invariably there’s going to be one issue or a couple of issues that are so divisive, that are so controversial that at some point they’re going to threaten to derail the process altogether. Often it’s things like citizenship. ‘Do we want to reduce our blood quantum criteria for citizenship? Do we want to get rid of it altogether?’ I can guarantee you that’s going to be controversial. It can be things like elections, it can be things like terms of office, it can be things like, ‘Do we want our elected officials to be fluent in the language of the people, the first language of the people?’

I worked with one tribe where that blew up the whole thing. They agreed on a bunch of other stuff, but the reform committee was divided right down the middle over that question and instead of saying, ‘Well, let’s set that one aside and proceed with what we agree upon,’ they said, ‘No, because we understand we’ve only got one shot at this, that’s our thinking, then it’s all or nothing,’ and it turned out to be nothing. And I read their draft constitution, it had some amazing things in it, some amazing things that only would have come from them. It is not something that any federal government bureaucrat would have ever dreamed up. It was definitely unique to them, but all that was lost because of disagreement over one thing that probably could have been tabled and an innovative solution could have been crafted over time and it could have been voted on separately.

And then when we’re seeing tribes abandon the Secretary of Interior approval clause and basically saying, ‘We’re going to leave it up to ourselves to determine how our constitution is going to be amended moving forward,’ a lot of thought needs to be given to that because you don’t want amending the constitution to be too easy because then it can be subject to the political whims of the day, the political, internecine fights of the day. You want to make it pretty difficult to change. Not impossible to change, but pretty difficult to change.

Another thing that more and more tribes are considering are older cultural solutions. If you look at some of the new constitutions that are being developed up in Canada by First Nations who are developing new constitutions either by abandoning the Indian Act or often they’re developing them in conjunction with these treaty processes that they’re going through with the provinces up there, some amazing innovative efforts to re-integrate governance principles, time-honored governance principles that are Indigenous to their own cultures. And it’s really fascinating and I think often we see First Nations in Canada looking to the tribes in the United States to learn from them about how do you engage in nation building, how do you engage in governance reform? And I think what we’re starting to see is that tribes in the U.S. have a...can learn a great deal from First Nations in Canada when it comes to constitutional reform and re-integrating culture. And not just culture in sort of the abstract, but culture in the ways that Indigenous nations lived traditionally, in the ways they thrived traditionally, the sophisticated governance mechanisms they had developed and honed over centuries and millennia to ensure their survival, ensure their prosperity. They’re bringing those things forward and they’re sort of tweaking them, they’re adapting them to meet the challenges that they face today in the 21st century.

So just some more information about some tips on the referendum process and again I think as attorneys this is where you’ll likely play a role. There’s the question of the secretarial election process, which is a federal election and then there’s the tribal election process where the tribal citizens come together and vote on this new constitution. And I won’t go through all these, but here’s an overview of some of the emerging best practices we’re seeing when it comes to the process of constitution reform.

And the one I added here is that when nations, and in particular constitutional reform bodies that they set up, have this conscious thought in mind that, ‘At the foundation of the work that we engage in on constitution reform and in the process of engaging the people about reform, we really need to set it up around two litmus tests of success and that’s trust and ownership.’ And basically the thinking is that, ‘We’ve got to do...we know the people, we’ve got...we know what the deterrents will be to them fully engaging this process. We’ve got to figure out, 'How do we overcome those obstacles, how do we engender in them a sense of trust in the process, which over time will ultimately lead to ownership in the result?’ Trust in the process and ownership in the result, and if you don’t have those things, you’re going to end up with that outcome where it was worse than what you started with."

Ian Record: Some of the Difficulties of Constitutional Reform (Presentation Highlight)

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Native Nations Institute
Year

In this highlight from the presentation "Defining Constitutions and the Movement to Remake Them," Ian Record discusses two of the many challenges that Native nations typically encounter when they move to change their existing constitutions or develop new ones.

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Native Nations
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Record, Ian. "Some of the Difficulties of Constitutional Reform (Presentation Highlight)." Tribal Constitutions seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 2014. Presentation highlight.

"Legacies of colonialism complicate it [constitutional reform]. I've had the great fortune of sitting down with Joe Fliles-Away, who you heard from this morning, and he often discusses when it comes to the issues of constitutions and constitutional reform -- and he may have shared it again with you this morning -- that it's really hard to do in Indigenous communities because you have so many people in your communities who are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, they're dealing with those traumas, however they're manifested whether it's substance abuse, alcohol abuse, violence in the home, whatever that is and you're trying to get them to care about their constitution and get them to provide input on how to change it. It's really, really difficult to get that person to contribute to this process because ideally you want everybody in your nation providing their voice to your constitution because your constitution is, ideally, supposed to be an expression of the will of the people. Frank Ettawageshik said it yesterday -- the constitution is the vehicle through which the people inform the government how they want the government to serve them and ideally you want all of your people providing that voice to that government.

So you have the legacies of colonialism. You have this issue of time. I'll never forget, and it was only a few months ago, we received an email from a tribe that we've been working with on and off over the years and it was from the chairman of the tribe and he sent us this email and he said, 'We're talking about constitutional reform here.' He said, 'I've only got X number of months left in my term.' He goes, 'I want to get this thing done before we get out of office or potentially I get booted out and somebody else comes in who may not share my belief that constitutional reform is a necessity for our tribe.' So he says, 'Here's the process I've laid out.' And we were reading through it and basically he had it in mind to come up with an entirely new constitution within six weeks. Six weeks. This is a nation of more than 5,000 people and he said, 'We can go from initiating a conversation with the community to having a draft constitution in six weeks.' It's not realistic. It's not realistic.

And so you really need to be cognizant of that issue about time because if you're going to engage in meaningful... a meaningful dialogue with your people around this issue of constitutionalism and what you want your constitution to look like moving forward, you've got to be very cognizant of time. You've got to understand going in that it's an organic, messy, unpredictable process and you can pre-plan it as much as you can and try to design the perfect process and inevitably you're going to have to retool, you're going to have to re-task in the midst of it because it's unpredictable. Unforeseen obstacles are going to arise and the idea that you can do it in that short a timeframe, it's just...it's on one level insane because it sort of assumes that you're not going to get to that level of engagement that you need to have with your people because often the challenge you face at a fundamental level is your people do not have ownership in that system, often because that system is not theirs. And so if you're serious about re-instilling in your system of governance a true sense of ownership by the people in that system, it's going to take time."

Jennifer Porter: Cultural Match Through Constitutional Reform at Kootenai

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this informative interview with NNI's Ian Record, Vice-Chairwoman Jennifer Porter of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho explains what prompted her nation to enact several amendments to its constitution in the mid-1990s, and how its ability to govern effectively has been greatly enhanced by its decision to its cultural roots when it comes to how it elects its leaders.

Native Nations
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Porter, Jennifer. "Cultural Match Through Constitutional Reform at Kootenai." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Insitute for Leadership, Management and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. April 2, 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 Jennifer Porter. Jennifer Porter is the former Chairwoman and now Vice Chairwoman of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. And we’re here today to talk about the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho’s constitution and some of the recent efforts they were engaged in to amend their constitution and how it’s working, etc. I guess we’ll just first I guess have you start off by just telling us a little bit more about yourself.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Okay. Good morning. My name is Jennifer Porter, Vice Chairwoman of the Kootenai Tribe. I’ve been on council for the past 17 years, I believe, so this would be my fourth term as a council member. I don’t know what else you want besides that. I could go in depth [on] family...”

Ian Record:

“Yeah, sure. Why not.”

Jennifer Porter:

“...I’m a mother to three children ages, 20, 14 and 12, recently a grandma. That was a big part of me stepping down from chair so I could have more time to just enjoy my life now.”

Ian Record:

“That’s good. You’ve got to have balance, right?”

Jennifer Porter:

“Oh, yes, and I’m loving it.”

Ian Record:

“And it’s hard to achieve that as an elected leader I know.”

Jennifer Porter:

“It is, yes.”

Ian Record:

“So we’re here to talk about your tribe’s constitution and you’re here in Tucson this week to serve as one of our presenters for our Tribal Constitution seminar. And one of the reasons that we focused on your tribe and on you in particular is because back in the mid-1990s, your tribe engaged in a referendum vote that ended up approving a set of amendments. And from what you were telling me yesterday there’s quite a back story to how all this came to be. And I guess we can start...if you could start just talking about where the tribe was in the mid-1990s, what sort of constitution it was working with, and sort of what prompted the tribe to go down the reform road.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Sure. It was pre-my term as a council, but I was of the age to understand, out of college. I worked in the accounting department and closely related to the council so I got to see what was going on and hear, read the minutes and such. And at that time and for a number of years prior to that, our constitution, it stated that it was a five-member council and one of those members was the hereditary chief and he had a seat on council. So every three years an election came, they elected four different council members, but the chief always had the residing seat on council. And that stemmed problems.

In our community, we are made up of three main families and three -- odd number -- there’s always one ousted. So every election they would elect two of those families to the council whoever the chief at that time was getting along with. And basically it came to where it was the chief and the chair that they would either be with each other or against each other and every time there was a discrepancy they would oust whoever the chair was or oust whoever the councilman that was going against whatever it was.

So at the time, my mother was the current chair and she said there was so much uproar all the time about decisions being made that whenever something was...a resolution was passed, an ordinance was made, she was just waiting for a petition from the tribal members. There were times where she went off to meetings and she would come back and she would be petitioned off the council and they would have to go through the whole system of putting her back on and it was just like that. It was just always...you just never knew what was going on at the time and it kind of...it stemmed from that where she just got tired of it. If they wanted her on council, if they wanted these four people on council for the three years then they needed to come up with some kind of agreement.

So what she had said, and I liked in yesterday’s...some of the, I forgot who that was talking, but he said that we need to go back into our old ways, our cultural ways, our customary ways of how we got together, how we determined where and how we’re going to move forward. Well, she went back to that and she went back to the elders and what she was told is that we would come together as families, the family heads would come together, the households, they would have council. And that’s what led her to her decision and she called all of the major...the three major families, the households, the people that she in the past had sat on council with. She called those people to the table. She also called some of the elders to the table that she knew that people listened to that made the difference, had certain wisdom amongst the community. She was able to gather them all at the same table. They talked and they came to an agreement. Some of them were for it, some of them were against it, but when they really thought about it, having districts...families having three different districts, then it was a win-win for everybody because no matter who was getting along, who wasn’t getting along, as a family you would always have two representatives on the seat of the council.”

Ian Record:

“So basically the solution was, ‘We’re going to do away with this system where...’ How did it work under the prior system where you had these five council members, one of which was a standing position with the hereditary chief, right? And that person sort of had a different status than the other four? Were the other four voted on at large by the entire community?”

Jennifer Porter:

“By the community, yes.”

Ian Record:

“So you could have a family who would not have any representation at all...”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes, yes.”

Ian Record:

“...on the council. And so you moved to this system which makes more cultural sense and also ensures that virtually everybody in the community because they’re going to be from one of these three main families in some respect would have a voice in the decision making process. Was that basically the premise?”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes, it was.”

Ian Record:

“So then in August of 1995, the tribe goes forward with these four amendments and this is to amend the 1947 constitution. I’m curious, what is your knowledge of that 1947 constitution? I believe that’s the first written constitution of the tribe.”

Jennifer Porter:

“That was the first written [constitution] of the tribe, correct.”

Ian Record:

“Do you have...do you know much about how that original constitution came to be and who sort of authored it and anything like that?”

Jennifer Porter:

“No. I was looking at the signatures of that and those were the people of the community, the past leaders, just some... the historians, yeah. And it’s interesting how it was written and as the chief had always a standing place on the council.”

Ian Record:

“So in August of 1995, as I mentioned, these four amendments are put up to vote and I’ll just roll through them very quickly. The first one deals with the issue of blood quantum and I would assume making a change to at least one-quarter...”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“...degree blood quantum in descendancy from someone on a base roll. Amendment D basically just is a name change. You’re changing the name from Kootenai Tribe of Indians to Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. Those turned out to be not so controversial, which you would...it’s interesting that the blood quantum one doesn’t turn out to be controversial because...”

Jennifer Porter:

“Right.”

Ian Record:

“...folks will understand why here in a second, that the second amendment deals with exactly what you said, this change to this family-based system of representation on the council, per the three main families. And then the third amendment deals...is a related one that deals with changing the quorum requirements in accordance with how this new council was going to be constituted.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“So you guys hold a vote, you pass all four amendments, you send them to the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] per your constitution, which says that the Secretary of Interior must approve of amendments to your constitution, which is typical language of tribal constitutions from that era. Then tell me what happens next.”

Jennifer Porter:

“So the first amendment was approved, the last amendment was approved, and just like you said they didn’t approve the districts and the idea of breaking the council up into the district families. So what does our council do? They...what we were told, the reason for that, I did find that out was basically because our tribe was very small at the time, it was maybe between 100 and 120 members, that BIA felt that it wasn’t...they were adhering to the U.S. vote of one vote, one person and since we were a small tribe they thought that not everybody in the tribe would have that vote if we broke it up. But we had the argument where each person would be represented though. They have the vote to their member, their family member being on the council. So I see that our council was very bold at that time, they were going in the direction of self-determination, exercising their self-governance. So they brought the 70 percent of the general membership, which I know there was way more than 70 percent at that time, came together because they wanted this to pass. They liked this whole concept and the whole idea. They came together and they voted to do away with the BIA approval. It happened, we sent that in and I believe that happened in ‘95 or ‘96 that BIA approved that. So less than a year later we instilled our own...the new amendment, too.”

Ian Record:

“So it’s been in place for close to 20 years now and I’m curious, you’ve been in a position of leadership within your tribe for virtually all of that time and you have a window into how divisive the previous system was. Can you compare how those two approaches to how the Kootenai citizens are represented in the decision-making process of the government and how those two have differed, how they compare and contrast?”

Jennifer Porter:

“Well, I was very blessed to be in the newer version of the constitution. I’d like to say I’ve never been petitioned off the council. I’ve never seen a petition since I started. Unfortunately, it was a loss of one of my family members is how I walked into our council. It was actually the first term of this new...the new constitution and he had passed away. So my family voted me into his...so I fulfilled the rest of his term, which was the three years. Since then it’s...I can only say good things about it. There have been no more petitions. Each member, if you go back home and you ask them, they all know who’s sitting on their family on the council. If they have an issue, the way the council works now is we ask them, ‘Have you talked to your family representative first?’ If they want something brought to the table, they have to go to their family representative. So it’s kind of like a two-point process. They can’t just come into a council meeting anymore. They have to have their family’s approval, they discuss it, and then it comes to the council. So as long as we know where they’re coming from, what kind of direction or what questions they’re asking.”

Ian Record:

“So from what you’re saying, I gather your governance system has become a lot more stable.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Yes.”

Ian Record:

“Because the leadership is...there’s continuity there and there’s not as much in-fighting or perhaps any in-fighting of note. And then there’s also an ability for people to get their needs addressed where it doesn’t consume the entire council’s attention. So I would imagine that frees you up to really focus...sort of be more forward looking and strategic in figuring out, ‘Okay, what direction do we want to head and what do I need to understand and learn as a council member or as a chair or vice chair in order to get us there,’ versus being distracted by constituent concerns that are better addressed at the family level. Is that accurate?”

Jennifer Porter:

“That is accurate. It seems like every family has their interest, like one family has a cultural interest, another is education, another is economic development so it kind of made it to where each family can invest more time with that, but also bringing it to the table and able to work together. We don’t have to deal with the, ‘Someone doesn’t like someone' or 'They did this to me years ago.’ Yeah, it’s just not dealt with anymore as on...they have to deal with that within their own district.”

Ian Record:

“So have you seen a shift in how the average citizen regards the government as a whole since this change was made? I would imagine with that back under the previous system if there’s a lot of infighting, if there’s a lot of petitioning to say, ‘Oh, let’s throw that bum out. He doesn’t agree with me,’ or whatever, that tends to feed among the people a very low regard for government and a very low regard for leadership in whoever’s holding that position. Have you seen a change in terms of how the people tend to view their government? Is there more pride in the system and saying, ‘Hey, we can do things. We can make decisions. We can implement those decisions. We can really move forward.’”

Jennifer Porter:

“There’s a tremendous change. There is that pride there. There is that respect that wasn’t seen there before. It took them a few years to actually get the concept of, ‘Hey, I can bring something to the council. All I have to do is go talk to my family rep,’ instead of feeling like nothing can be done until we get a family member in there. So now they do have that voice, they can make a difference. And right now it’s broken down to council each has their different interest in the area and it’s kind of like if they don’t feel comfortable going to this council talking to education they’ll talk to their family member and then that family member will go talk to that council. So it’s kind of...it works so much better. It’s more...even though it’s more family based, it works better for the community overall.”

Ian Record:

“So are there other areas of the constitution that the tribe perhaps is having a conversation about changing or strengthening or anything like that? Is there more attention being paid now to figuring out, ‘Okay, yeah, things are working well. Are there ways we can make it work better,’ or are things just sort of chugging along.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Things are working well as it is and I think it’s more if it’s working just let it be.”

Ian Record:

“Well, that’s great. I wish I could say this is a typical story coming out of Indian Country but it’s...I think what Kootenai has done with you would think on its face one simple change, but it sounds like the trickle down effect throughout the government has been very constructive across the board. I think it offers a promising success story and a promising blueprint for other nations to look at to say, ‘If we just look to our own traditions, we just look to our own values and how we did things before and try to bring that forward into the 21st century we can achieve our own goals, we can govern well, we can make decisions in a unified fashion.’”

Jennifer Porter:

“And it was a blend. I like the way it was presented yesterday about going back to your traditions and your culture and the way I seen it when he was talking is it’s a blend of the culture and today’s world, bringing those together and being able to make it work.”

Ian Record:

“Well, Jennifer, really appreciate you taking some time to sit down with us. I know it was a little bit short notice, but I thank you for agreeing to share your story with us. We’re always eager to learn about new stories of constitutional success and constitutional enhancement and self-determination in action.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Well, thank you. It was a determination of...I think you guys have been asking me for like four or five years to come and I finally had the time.”

Ian Record:

“Well, persistence pays off, right?”

Jennifer Porter:

“It does.”

Ian Record:

“Well, again, thank you and hopefully others will learn from Kootenai’s story.”

Jennifer Porter:

“Thank you."

Jim Gray and Patricia Riggs: Citizen Engagement: The Key to Establishing and Sustaining Good Governance (Q&A)

Producer
National Congress of American Indians
Year

Presenters Jim Gray and Patricia Riggs field questions from audience members about the approaches their nations took and are taking to engage their citizens and seed community-based, lasting change. In addition, session moderator Ian Record offers a quick overview of some effective citizen strategies that the Native Nations Institute has encountered in its work with Native nations across the country, and leaves audience members with some questions to consider as they assess how their nations are engaging their citizens. 

This video resource is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the National Congress of American Indians.

Resource Type
Citation

Gray, Jim. "Citizen Engagement: The Key to Establishing and Sustaining Good Governance (Q&A)." 70th Annual Convention & Marketplace, National Congress of American Indians. Tulsa, Oklahoma. October 15, 2013. Presentation.

Riggs, Patricia. "Citizen Engagement: The Key to Establishing and Sustaining Good Governance (Q&A)." 70th Annual Convention & Marketplace, National Congress of American Indians. Tulsa, Oklahoma. October 15, 2013. Presentation.

Ian Record:

“You know, one of the things that really sticks out for me having worked with the Pueblo over the last several years is this use of focus groups and I was honored to be part of one such focus group that they convened about three and a half years ago. It was real interesting. They brought in a mix of folks: tribal leaders, leaders of the Pueblo, employees of the Pueblo, and just your average Joe citizens. And I remember when we were doing this focus group, one of the citizens became very emotional because she said, ‘This is the first time my Pueblo has actually asked me what I think. They actually care about my opinion and my view on where we are and where we want to head.’ And basically what she was saying is, ‘I have a voice and I matter.’ And I think that’s really the theme that I hear out of both of these wonderful, ongoing success stories is about restoring the voice to the people and figuring out not just about hearing that voice but, 'How do we actually actualize that in the governance of the nation? How do we put that into practice?' And that’s really what she’s staying up here. It’s not just garnering the tribal information, the voice of the people, but actually using it. How do we actually use that, how do we actually put that into play, how do we actually make that real, not just today, but into the future?”

Mark Macarro:

“My question is for Jim. Glad to see you used a movie quote, by the way. My question’s about the…I guess in the process of trying to reach a consensus or actually maybe it wasn’t the consensus point, it was the point where you tried to get moving past the status quo. Was there a rationalization by the head rights people that we shouldn’t do this because this is our custom and tradition, this is what we do, this is all we know and it’s who we are? But this is really a question about planting the flag of custom and tradition and using that as a reason for resisting the change. Did you encounter that in particular?”

James R. Gray:

“Oh, yeah. We really did and I would say the biggest part of it was tied to…what I wanted to make sure came across very clear was that the form of government that in 1906 the federal government imposed on us was not one of our choosing. We had a constitutional government before that and we had a three-branch government. We had our court system, we had law enforcement, we had all the elements of jurisdiction in place, and because of other reasons, the United States government abolished that unilaterally, illegally, as a part of their effort to try to bring all the tribes under allotment for statehood and breaking up the tribal land holdings was very difficult for the Osages because the full-blood faction would not ever gonna go along with allotment and it’s a historical fact that there was a lot of Osages enrolled out of nowhere, just suddenly started showing up as Osages. Another election was held, the next thing you know we went from having 1,000 Osages to 2,229 Osages. The new council that got in tried to fight it. In 1911, I think, the unilateral authority of the Indian agent at the time obliterated the members and installed interim council people because they weren’t going along with what was expected of them by the Indian agent.

I think the Osages by that time, when the oil was discovered and the money started coming in and the Osages started getting murdered in large numbers, most of them were people with numerous head rights that in today’s dollar were valued at a million dollars a year, much like the per capita distribution for Pechanga citizens. No, I’m just kidding. What I was saying was that there was what they called the 'reign of terror.' It was one of the first cases the FBI actually investigated was the complete and utter wipeout of Osages to get their money. It’s a historical fact. My mom was an orphan in 1925. My dad was an orphan in 1928 and my dad and mom’s stories aren’t unique in the Osage storyline. And you hit the period of time when they weren’t even allowing Osage women to participate in Osage elections. So not only were you…had to be Osage to have a head right, but you also had to be an Osage man to be able to participate in elections. Osage women could get a head right, but they couldn’t vote. All those changes occurred after World War II, so there was a steady drumbeat of slow but sure progress, but at the same time knowing that if Osages pushed too hard, there was going to be consequences: wipeout of your tribal council, the complete indifference of the BIA while your own citizens’ homes were being blown up and murdered on the street. My great grandfather, Henry Run Horse, was taken out in the countryside and shot in the head. These are common stories. Every one of these stories as tragic as they were resulted in Osage losing another head right.

In 1978, the tribal council was able to get to the U.S. Congress to amend the 1906 Act to make sure that no more Osages would be able to, no more non-Osages would be able to inherit any part of an Osage mineral estate again. So we had to go 70 plus years into that period of time at which we probably lost maybe a fourth to a third of those head rights during that period of time to what are now defunct oil companies, non-Indian spouses who’ve moved on and married on and still collect a head right check. Jean Harlow, the famous actress, some Osage fell in love with her in Kansas City and he died unfortunately, willed his head right to her. Unfortunately for her, she died shortly after that, didn’t have any heirs. IIM maintained Jean Harlows’ estate for years. These kind of stories are just…the Catholic Church owns several dozen head rights. Non-Indian wealthy landowners in Osage County own many head rights. Businesses like Phillips Petroleum Company own head rights. If Osages were a little reluctant for any radical change even as late as 2004 and ‘05, I have to give them some credit, because living memory of many of these people seeing all these changes occur and it was just a matter of getting to a moment of crisis, and that crisis was that last original allottee mark. Nobody knew the answer to that question when the last allottee died and in 2004 when [President George W.] Bush signed the bill into law, we only had one left. So if there was anyway to kind of get past that point to go forward and really move it, it was that critical issue, in my opinion. There may have been other people with different opinions but that was one of my [observations].”

Ian Record:

“Next question. I think we had the lady in front. Minnie, did you want to…”

Lenora Hall:

“Hello. My name’s Lenora Hall, I’m from the Smith River Rancheria in Northern California where the redwoods are. I’m just wondering, you went from -- this question is for Patricia [Riggs] -- you went from 68 acres to 78,000 acres. Did you have any, how much of that 78,000 acres is in trust now? What have you done? Are you buying land and seeking trust status with it? Because I seen a lot of them had economic enterprises on them, which are real lucrative and stuff and so I’m wondering what the status of your land is.”

Patricia Riggs:

“Well, we went from 68 acres that was conveyed into trust to 75,000 acres. 70,000 of those acres are a ranch and it’s not in trust. We’re working for it to be put into trust, but from those 68 original acres in trust we have something like 3,700 acres in trust. So we’ve got quite a bit of land into trust. One of the places that we put back into trust is an area called Waco Tanks and it’s a mountain. It’s a mountain that is sacred to us and unfortunately we couldn’t get all that mountain, it’s a state park, but we were able to get the back side of the mountain and put that back into trust and all our residential areas are in trust as well. The ranch is a working ranch, but there is also some significance as far as traditional places and where we go to gather different plants and things and hunting as well.”

Ian Record:

“Other questions? Sherry, go ahead.”

Sherry Salway Black:

“So Pat, and this is for both, but Pat you talked specifically about measuring impact and evaluation, like how do you know you’ve been successful? So I would ask that in the sense of how much are people participating now? So you’ve done the education, you’ve done the focus groups. So for your citizens, do you have high percentage of citizens voting in elections? So just again, how are you measuring your citizen participation on an ongoing basis?”

Patricia Riggs:

“Well, one of the things that we don’t measure officially, but participation in cultural events and ceremonies, I would have to say it’s more than doubled. We used to maybe have 50 dancers, now the line is so long and getting really hard, because we actually jog kind of through the streets and it used to be a short little jog, but now it’s so long you can barely jog. But the other thing is we also measure impact as far as how much more revenues are coming to the tribe, how much more taxes are coming to the tribe, how many more people are enrolled in college and coming to tribal meetings and things like that. So I’ve just pretty much learned to count everything, even when I’m participating in ceremony, I’m counting.”

Jim Gray:

“Shortly after the constitution was passed we had that kind of deer-in-the-headlights look on ourselves after the election was over and we were all sworn in it’s like, ‘Okay, now what do we do? We’ve been fighting this battle for 100 years.’ We got together and I put my cabinet together, it was the first time a chief got to put a cabinet together in 100 years. So a lot of new stuff was occurring and I realized there was a sense of historical importance in all the little things that I was doing in establishing new protocols for the executive branch, little things mattered in terms of how we addressed ourselves and how we separated the political appointees from the career employees and started drawing those distinctions in HR [human resources] policies. But I think the thing that really I recall the most was a desire to go back into the communities again, and this time not for a constitution that would require a referendum vote, but for a general direction to give us a plan, a strategy plan, and Pat used the term master plan, but a plan nonetheless that everyone had some ownership in. And we kind of brought back the old bunch of government reform, we brought in a bunch of new people that had been left out of the process before and we went back out there with what we called the 'Team of Teams' and we asked for a million dollar budget. Congress gave us half of it with the conditions of seeing certain things happen within six months and we all had to be very careful, but very specific at how we did this. And so we generated a strategic plan that would last for 25 years generally combined into six areas; education, health care, economic development, mineral and natural resources, governance and justice, and cultural preservation. And in each one of them they had a set of projects, in each six of those categories. And each one of those six categories were bunched up into three different categories of short term, midterm, long term. So each one of them had about 50 different projects assigned to it, everything from going after your water rights to establishing citizen input, citizen rights like a bill of rights kind of process to establish stronger justice systems. We didn’t have an AG [Attorney General] office at the time so there was a lot of institution building that called for…that came out of that. Updating our entire master campus plan, which was going to be a huge undertaking, because that campus had been a hodgepodge of trailers and metal buildings that we got from CDBG grants 30 years ago that we’re still using them and they leak like a sieve and their constant care of maintenance is just draining the tribe’s properties budget. So it took us years to kind of draw these conclusions about revitalizing our language program, revitalizing all these different categories, compacting our health clinic, taking greater control of the mineral estate. There was just this…but we wouldn’t take on anything big unless we went back out and talked to the communities again. And that’s how this whole thing kind of became part of what I believe is a new expectation that our citizens have of their tribal government. ‘If you’re going to do anything big, you better come out and talk to us.’ That seems to be the attitude now and I think that’s stuck.”

Audience member:

“I was wondering, how do you…you have a significant part of your membership out in the world, you said there’s Osages everywhere. So how do you communicate with them? How do you get them involved? That’s part of your whole thing is involvement.”

Jim Gray:

“Well, there’s one thing that has happened in the last 10 years that I think we all to some degree have become more familiar with and it’s social media.”

Audience member:

“Yeah.”

Jim Gray:

“Obviously we have people’s addresses, they get the newspaper every month. That was the traditional way. The advent of our expansion of our tribal website, [we were] able to put archived audio of council meetings and videos of special events that the tribe would undertake that anybody who wanted to can participate. It was kind of a one-way communication to them.”

Audience member:

“And did you say that your meetings are open?”

Jim Gray:

“Yes.”

Audience member:

“Oh, okay. So anybody in the world, any Osage in the world or non…?”

Jim Gray:

“Anybody.”

Audience member:

“Anybody can tap in and listen to your meetings?”

Jim Gray:

“…which that 'anybody' part has been the subject of a lot of debate too but…”

Audience member:

“Yeah.”

Jim Gray:

“…The thing is that in this day and era where we live it’s impossible to live on an island. You’re just going to have to embrace the fact that everyone’s going to know your business eventually. There’s so many public records, public documents, there’s Freedom of Information Act laws in our tribe, anybody can apply for them. And the tribal newspaper being an independent body can go get things and disclose it in their newspaper, which everybody can get. They’re members of the AP [Associated Press], it could be picked up. There’s just…don’t fight it, just accept it and go on.”

Audience member:

“Do you have council members who live in different parts of the world that can be on the council or do you have to live within the service area of the Osage?”

Jim Gray:

“We have election of councilmen at large, so the top six in staggered terms get elected and then another six in another staggered term get elected. There’s been a lot of discussion about district voting. When I told you we had a referendum vote before the big vote, that was one of the questions and the people by a large margin voted for at-large votes.”

Shawn Bordeaux:

“Good dialogue. I hate to break it up here. Especially for Pat, but Chief Gray, please comment as well. I’m from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and I work at a tribal college, Sente Gleska University, and we have engaged with our 20 communities about 130 miles by about 50 miles. We have five counties that we have roughly a million acres in and when you look at a map it just shows one of the counties and a lot of the development happens in that county and my question is about priorities. We have 135 hours of comments from when we went out as a tribal college and filmed, as you’re doing, all the ideas that people have and now the question is it’s a tug-o-war. When you’re a very big community, do you take care of the neediest first or do you develop where the revenues will lead to other opportunities to go to the bank and to continue to develop? I’m just kind of curious. You did a really good job of taking the flyer failure, I had to say it, but we have that problem, where some people don’t show up and I like your strategy of going to the little groups, but how do we get this tug-o-war…? How do we get past there where we say, ‘Okay, you guys, you’re coming in 30 years. We know you’re farthest away from the tribe, but you’re not going to be developed first.’ So I’m struggling trying to figure out how to help our community to set a priority list.”

Patricia Riggs:

“Well, as far as housing is concerned, that’s a real priority for us, but we’ve determined different ways to bring housing to the community. Of course we have HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], but then it becomes very limited because we have this group of people that don’t qualify for HUD, but yet they can’t get affordable housing. So one of the things we did is we tried to diversify the way in which we brought housing to the community and we brought investors to do the low-income tax credits units. We also have housing, but then council is also, what they’re doing is some of the HUD housing that’s already paid off, they’re buying that back from tribal members who may be elders and then they’re reselling it to other tribal members. And we also have…we’ve started to…we’ve contacted the BIA and HUD to do the low income, not the low income, but the guaranteed loans. So we’re also looking at different ways to…maybe some of the elders, move them out of housing and bring in an elder center, but also bring in more housing around our ceremonial areas because what…so that’s one of our priorities is to rebuild our ceremonial areas in the places that were once villages around the ceremonial areas, because in order to protect our ceremonial places we need people there. So that’s one of the ways that we prioritize. Eventually what we want to do is rebuild some traditional houses around our ceremonial areas, bring the elders back there. But then we’re also thinking about, as far as priorities, the places that make the most sense for us are the places that are going to fill in those gaps where our original land base, in the core. We’re calling it the 'core' of our community. So we determined that that was going to be a priority for us. And then also to build either through commercial areas -- we know that it’s coming, so we’re just thinking, 'Why not do it ourselves?' And some of what you saw there was some of the boulevards that are closest to our community. So what our plan is is to invest and then be able to reinvest for more land acquisition, even if we have to lease to retail areas and things like that. So our priority for us is to protect those places that are most traditional and the core of our community and then to move outward and to fill those little gaps as well.”

Jim Gray:

“Real quick. One of the things that we were very blessed with at the time of our constitutional reformation was the fact that simultaneously, while that was going on, we were opening casinos at a very fast pace and getting a lot of people to work, creating a lot of jobs. In 2002, there was like 200 full-time employees at the Osage Nation. In 2006, there was about 900. In 2010, there was about 1,800. During that period of time, a lot of Osages came back because there was something to come back to -- there were jobs. Not just casino jobs because the money that was leaving the casinos and going to the tribe, the tribe would invest in expansion of a lot of programs, specifically the education program, scholarships. So the benefits of the tribe that spilled out into the communities, no matter where you were, you were an Osage, in New York City or California or Washington State, you were eligible to apply for a college scholarship program. If you met all the criteria of making the grades and getting yourself accepted into state-recognized schools, different types, private schools too, but couldn’t match the kind of funds that other tribes were giving because there was like 12 -- by the time I left office, I think we had 1,000 kids in college somewhere around the United States. Before we may have had a few hundred kids in college and they were getting like $300 a semester. Well, now we’re giving them like $5,000 a semester and that’s almost enough to cover all your expenses. Almost, depends on where you’re going, but it covers a big chunk of it. So the more we were able to bring the resources back out of the communities, simultaneously as their political rights were becoming more involved, questions of accountability and participation and eligibility became more part of the social media conversations. And I can promise you between that, the language program, which just blossomed in the last 10 years because the tribe was putting a million dollars a year into the program that we just invented on our own and the kids that got to take Osage language in the public school system were speaking it in the hallways and classes. There was one story in Skiatook where I’m from where the quarterback was Osage and he’d taken those classes and he convinced his linemen to take Osage that weren’t Osage. And his cadence in Osage was good for at least one to two offside penalties every game. All of a sudden people started getting the benefit and there was this swagger, this confidence that didn’t exist before that you had the political rights and the financial resources to actually exercise and were going on at the same time. And when that was going on we didn’t have any trouble filling up a room whenever we did something.”

Ian Record:

“Thank you panelists. One final round of applause. We only have a couple minutes left and I wanted to wrap up with just some food for thought as you leave. My colleague Minnie is handing out flash drives courtesy of NNI as a show of gratitude for your attending the session today. It’s got some really good information about some of NNIs current initiatives. I wanted to share with you some strategies we’ve seen have been effective and again you see a lot of these coming through the comprehensive and multi-faceted approaches that Osage and Ysleta del Sur have been pursuing there in citizen engagement.

And really what I want you to think about when I roll through these is really the challenge incumbent upon all of you is how do we re-instill a sense of tribal-specific civics in our community? How do we get our citizens to want to actively engage their governance in a constructive way where they feel like they’re contributing to the present and future of the nation? So things like high school classes, community college classes, community meetings to discuss tribal government, tribal history, tribal law, a series in the tribal newspaper, ongoing series conveying the messages and themes that you want to get across to begin to inspire your people to participate, youth councils. That’s a huge movement across Indian Country, where we’re seeing this emergence of youth councils to try to get the future generation of nation leaders oriented in the right way figuring out how they can contribute. Tribal government handbooks, history courses for tribal government employees -- Cherokee is a leader in this area -- focus groups, as Pat’s nation has used so effectively, and then one on one. I think the challenge facing everybody in this room is to think about how do I begin to move our citizen education and engagement work forward on my one on one interactions with my professional colleagues, with the citizens I run into at the grocery store to either start a new conversation or change the existing one to something that’s more productive that’s pointed towards moving the nation forward, to breaking through some of these barriers and sort of things that keep us in place. How do we keep that moving forward?

And then finally some things to think about. Think about citizen engagement not as an event, but as a process. I think what particularly Jim said and what you see from Pat’s visuals is that you really need to conceive of this as a permanent part of your governance challenge. This is not something you just do when you have a big referendum vote; it’s something you need to do all the time. You need to institutionalize it as a governmental priority and fund it accordingly. You need to pay people to help you do this work. It’s not just about the elective leadership going out and doing the messaging and getting citizens engaged. You need an actual governmental apparatus to carry this work out. Know all of your audiences. You saw that with Pat’s presentation. You have to know who you’re trying to reach. You need to know how they learn. Do you know how your young people learn? Do you know what sort of social media they’re using? Do you have a presence on that social media? Are you speaking to them through that mechanism? If not, you need to think about, 'How do we begin to do that?' And we’re seeing some tribes begin to develop social media policies because they realize, as Jim said, it’s a part of life; it’s a fact of life. You’ve got to figure out how do we take advantage of this. Develop a holistic approach to tribal civics that demands that everyone teach as well as learn. That’s why Indigenous societies were so vibrant traditionally is because everyone had a role in imparting the knowledge of the nation to carry it forward. It wasn’t just the job of government, it wasn’t just the job of formal education systems, it was the job of everybody. Keep up with and capitalize on new technology, just talked about that. And finally, track your citizen engagement activities and their effectiveness. Pat made that point crystal clear. So you’ve got to assess what you’re doing and figure out, 'Is there a way we can do it better?'"