Lance Morgan

Honoring Nation: Lance Morgan: Ho-Chunk, Inc. Economic Development Corporation

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Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
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Ho-Chunk, Inc. CEO Lance Morgan share the lessons he and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska have learned about the keys to creating an economic development environment capable of fostering successful nation-owned enterprises. He stresses the need for some Native nations to engage in constitutional reform in order to create that environment, in particular staggering the terms of elected officials to ensure a nation's institutional stability and, in turn, the strategic direction and advancement of the businesses it owns and operates.

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Morgan, Lance. "Ho-Chunk, Inc. Economic Development Corporation." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Santa Fe, New Mexico. February 8, 2002. Presentation.

Miriam Jorgensen:

"My name's Miriam Jorgensen. I had the opportunity to talk to some of you yesterday. I'm the Research Director for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and I'm more recently the Associate Director for Research for the Native Nations Institute. And as many have said already, that one of the most exciting projects they're involved with is the Honoring Nations program. And it's through the Honoring Nations program that I personally met our next speaker and then had the opportunity to get to know him even better through the program that Gail Christopher, your lunchtime speaker, runs, the Innovations in American Government program, because I got to do the site visit to Lance's program this past July and met with him, and he shared a lot of information about what he's up to both with the business, what the tribe is doing and about some of their ideas and goals. And that work then led, his work that I wrote about for the Advisory Committee, led to the award that he received for Innovations in American Government.

On one hand, Lance doesn't need a lot of introduction. The experience that I had with him is that he's just a remarkable guy, because one of the things that happens is that you spend just a few minutes with him and he leaves an incredibly strong impression. You feel, ‘Boy, I really know this person and I'd really like him as my friend and if he isn't my friend, I really don't want him as my enemy,' because this is one smart guy in terms of strategy, in terms of politics, and in terms of getting things accomplished. There are a couple things I want to say about Lance, that it's just a real honor to introduce Lance Morgan. He's a Harvard Law School graduate, he is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. I grew up in South Dakota and we tended to just kind of ignore that state down there. And he's a real family man. One of the things I really enjoyed about the visit that I made to visit his program is I got to meet his wife and one of his two daughters. He's somebody who really believes in investing in community and using his smarts to help move his community and his nation forward. He's really bright with economic development. He's a very savvy politician. He can tell many stories about how he's really stood up to the States of Nebraska and Iowa and the federal government and won his way in terms of sovereign rights for his nation and he's a real fighter for Indian issues. And the last thing I want to say about Lance is, when he takes the mic you never know what he's going to talk about. So he may talk about his winning innovation and he may talk about other things but I'm sure you're going to come away moved so I give you Lance Morgan of Ho-Chunk, Inc."

Lance Morgan:

"Wow! I'm really glad I caused something to talk about. I really appreciate that introduction. Miriam came and took the time to really spend some time and get to know us and we really enjoyed her visit. And I think it was really instrumental; our experience with the Honoring Nations program was really instrumental in us winning the Innovations in Government Award, which I think is kind of the big brother of this award, I'm not sure, but they seemed awful similar. And so I really appreciate the time and effort that everyone in Honoring Nations program...they put in on our behalf to do that. And I really appreciate coming down to do this. I've been traveling a lot lately and I was trying to think of a way that I could reasonably not come, because my family's been really pressuring me to spend more time at home, but I thought it was important to come down and share some of our stories and I really came down to talk about Ho-Chunk, Inc., but I've really decided that I don't want to talk about that all and as the time that I've spent here, just like Miriam suggested. I really only have one point to make and it's going to take about 15 minutes. I'm starting to take after my grandfather I think. What I'm going to do is generalize a lot and I kind of want to apologize in advance for that because every tribe is very, very unique and I think in order to do this without all these kind of side issues coming up or all these caveats or all these exceptions, I'm going to talk in very general terms. So I want...and I really don't want to offend anybody in this situation so I want to just apologize right up front.

Since we won the Innovations in Government Award and the Honoring Nations Award, I think we've really struck a chord and we've been visited by over 30 tribes, and we've put our information together in a package and we've sent it out to 40 or 50 other tribes. And so what's happened is, over the last 18 months, we've learned a lot of things and that's what I want to share, some of the simple insights from that. And we've really been on almost like a crash course of tribal economics. And what we've learned are really two simple things. And the first thing is something that's very obvious is that almost all the tribes are suffering from the same problems. We all seem to be having universally the same issues that we're all dealing with. And the second thing -- and this one came as a bit of a shock to me -- we were really forced to think about why we were successful. And the reason it came as a shock because I was thinking it was me and that's not the answer. And it hurt a little bit, but I'm over it now. Why we were successful, what are the reasons behind that? And what are the reasons behind some of the other tribe's reasons why they continue to struggle all the time? They had...we're not...we don't have a lot of money in our tribe and our corporation has grown to the point where we're projecting $100 million in revenues, which strikes me as absolutely insane. In 1995, Ho-Chunk, Inc. was in my apartment in the second bedroom, and so it's amazing. Our tribal casino makes $3 or $4 million a year. And how have we been able to take -- and Ho-Chunk, Inc. does nothing with the tribal gaming -- so how have we been able to go from literally zero to $100 million in revenue in that period of time? And I think it...this is why I was taking the credit, I was thinking it was me, but really it's a...we're really a product of our environment and that's what I want to talk about a little bit.

We've boiled down some of this that we've learned to a couple of really, really simple points and some of them have kind of coalesced here just in the last day doing some of these roundtable discussions. Harvard says sovereignty matters. Harvard says -- I've been saying this for years -- institutions matter. They say that culture matters. That's right, of course they matter, but what conditions in a tribe allow the development of the institutions that can effectively use sovereignty and still integrate culture? Well, in other words, the real question we should be asking is not the what -- what did Ho-Chunk, Inc. do to be successful -- is the why. Why were we successful, what was behind it? And to be honest, what we have done from a business standpoint to be successful is meaningless to this discussion because you should do something else. You should do what works for you. But the why, the why our government was willing to make such a radical change, was willing to do something we'd never done before and commit, at that point, 20 percent of all of their money to starting Ho-Chunk, Inc., everything they had, and a very poor tribe. Why were we willing to invest in that institution on a long-term plan when we were suffering from huge social problems and huge unemployment issues? What caused our tribe to make that radical decision and to also let go of that authority, that micromanagement over it, and set a system up that had a chance to kind of flourish and develop? And to me, that's really the issue.

And I didn't understand this, because Ho-Chunk, Inc. was set up in late 1994. I graduated from law school in '93. I worked at a law firm. I showed up and thought it was me, but really, as I've been there, I've realized that it was the product of a very, very long process. The tribe even tried to do this in the ‘80s and that I was...that my plan was really just the next step, was really just the next logical basis for it and the only reason we had a higher chance of success is because we had some gaming dollars; before they were trying to do it with smoke and mirrors. And so I've learned a lot. I've really been forced to think about that. We've learned that success in tribes seems to happen kind of randomly, somewhat randomly. One tribe does this here; the neighboring tribe is not doing very well. But there really seems to be two circumstances under which a tribe is successful and one of them involves kind of the really good individual, the great individual or this group of individuals, the super-motivated person. A tribe is a very unique place you get to work at because one person can make a difference there. You can...and if one person is highly motivated, they can bring others into the fold and make a difference. And I wonder, what I wonder when I see some of these programs up here, I wonder how many of them are motivated by, are the result of great individuals or great systems. And I think that if you're relying upon the great individual, it's probably a mistake because they probably don't come along that often. And so I think that you're better off waiting for number two or working on number two, which is the tribes who are successful tend to be successful because it's kind of a natural and kind of logical evolution of some of the systems that they put in place, the systems that kind of allow long-term continuity and stability. In other words, the success isn't random; it's really a predictable kind of factor in their environment if they have these systems in place.

So since the individual's topic is too hard to discuss because it's too random, I really want to focus on what I think that we learned about continuity and long-term stability. And all this is leading up by the way to the simplest of points and will be obvious soon. Most tribes are structured around their tribal council. Think about your tribal government. In the structure, the organizational structure of a tribe...I've seen lots of neat charts, but really what they are, the typical organizational chart in reality is very wide and very flat with everybody reporting up to the council, businesses, departments -- everything has to go through the council. And what that means is that a lot of times things aren't necessarily dealt with efficiently, they're forgot about, they're dealt with only when things go negatively. And it also has the additional side effect of making your tribal government incredibly dependent upon the skills and knowledge base of that tribal council. So the system is designed to funnel through the council and it's only as strong as the individuals on that council and that's a weakness, that's a weakness in my view. I'm going to back up a second here.

How can we ensure that those council members, since we're so dependent upon them, are good? And I was thinking and I want to say that I'm not an expert on this because I'm going to talk about Winnebago and what we used to do traditionally. And I'm just going to say what was told to me and I want it very clear that it's not my place to talk about this kind of thing typically. Traditionally in Winnebago, our leaders were the head of each of our clans and those leaders were selected by the women in those clans because it was felt that their concern for their family and their children automatically meant that they would pick somebody who they thought was knowledgeable...that was the best person and typically they picked the eldest person within that group, family group and the most experienced. Not always -- sometimes they would take somebody younger. It wasn't a rule that it was the eldest, it just typically was. So what we had was a system, a rational, traditional system based upon knowledge and experience. We had it kind of built into what we already did and change usually occurred at death. Not the next election. The reason we had this is because if we didn't, we would make mistakes and people would probably die. We had a cultural imperative for a rational system and that changed when the federal government forced kind of these constitutions on tribal governments and that changed the system dramatically. And when they did this, I can just imagine some lawyer in D.C. typing this up in the ‘30s, saying, ‘Well, this is a good idea', and someone said, ‘Sure, fine.' And there wasn't any thought whatsoever as to how to kind of institutionalize or introduce some of these already very rational processes that we had in place. It just happened. And we've been dealing with that for the last 70, 80 years.

The majority of tribes in our area have a tribal council that's elected every two or three years. This system is horrible, absolutely horrible for long-term continuity. I'm going to list a few things that it does and this stuff to anybody who's been with the tribe, this is not going to be earth shattering, but I think it's helpful to put it altogether. It creates kind of...these elections become all-or-nothing events and it creates a highly negative political environment on the reservation where attacking is the way to get on. There is no kind of getting on board, being part of the team. It creates a possibility of complete turnover of the elected representatives every two or three years. These new council members in this negative environment are often elected by attacking the current system. You don't get elected by praising the existing government. And so...it hasn't worked for us anyway. It used to be very...when we first started Ho-Chunk, Inc., it was very common to get elected by attacking Ho-Chunk, Inc. It was a very good way to get elected in Winnebago. It was very controversial at the time, which was almost the best way to do it. But this attack system almost forces the new council to tear down what's there. They almost had no choice. Their electorate expects it. It also leads to kind of inconsistent political strategy. You have no relationship with the local, the state, and the federal authorities. They don't even know who the next guy is. And it also hurts business dramatically. It really hurts your strategy. You have no continuity over a period of time. Business needs to be continually moving; it can't wait and stop for the election. You can't wait for the hammer to fall. You can't replace the CEO every couple of years and hope to have any kind of consistency in what you're doing. And the other thing is it also creates a lot of short-term thinking; both right after the election, you've got to make your big splash, and right before an election.

We joke that...one time we gave a dollar raise, the council did, to every employee at the casino before an election and we calculated how much that was over the period of a year and I said, ‘We only have...' I mean, you could win our election with 120 votes. We tried to work it out per vote and only a third of the employees were tribal members and it came out to an astronomical number per vote, what that cost the tribe. It was something in the tens of thousands per vote. But it was a very popular decision at the time and the tribe had money then to do that. And so before the election at least all kinds of really random short-term thinking and decision-making that has long-term implications that screws up long-term planning. And it makes it even worse when they don't...when it doesn't work and they don't get re-elected and the new guys come in and have to deal with that and tear that down and there really isn't any sense of long-term strategy in that stuff. So these tribes are in this kind of cycle, this perpetual cycle of starting over and unless the tribal electorate is incredibly rational in a very negative, in an environment that's likely to be very negative -- because that's your system for success to get elected -- unless they're very rational and elect the same people consistently over and over again, which does happen in some tribes -- some tribes they're all up for election and they reelect generally the same people -- unless they do that, the possibility of any kind of long-term cohesive strategy or continuity is very, very minimal in a tribal government that has its election every two or three years and everybody's up to bat.

In Winnebago, we're lucky and I didn't realize how lucky we were really, I mean I knew it was a good thing, but I didn't realize how lucky we were until we visited with these other tribes. We have staggered terms. We have nine tribal council members. Three of them are up for election every year and usually two or three are re-elected again. I'm going to list the nine, just the number of years that each council member has been on our council to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. And a lot of people when they get older will leave the council and they'll kind of designate some of the younger to start cycling through. It's very much a logical system, really kind of based behind the scenes on families and clan membership and stuff. But our council members are one year, three year, three year, four year, five year, five year, eight year, 14 year, 16 year and our tribal chairman is in his 16th year. And so I was going to do the math on it and do the average number of years there but I didn't have a calculator. My math skills are worse since high school. My guess is that's around six, six or seven. And what does that do for long-term strategy? Our tribal chairman was there in 1986 when we first tried to start a corporation. The Winnebago Business Code of 1986, he was there, he was behind it. So in 1993 or '94 we started again, of course he supported it. This made more sense, it was the next evolution in this process and these staggered terms, they have several kind of natural results. It reduces the kind of emphasis on the elections themselves. It prevents this kind of radical short-term thinking that we were talking about. There isn't this great push...because only two or three of them are going crazy before the election, but the rest of them can kind of hold them in. It also allows kind of naturally a long-term planning and a long-term kind of projects to continue to move forward. It automatically allows for kind of an institutional knowledge base to continue to grow. There is no starting over here. And the elections, I've never seen an election that's resulted in a firing of a key employee. I've never...because it doesn't happen that way because the rest of the people obviously support that person. And more importantly, I think it allows kind of a system where these institutions can naturally evolve because they're really focused on the long-term perspective. I think this not starting over is very positive. And I didn't know, I didn't really think about this in these terms until very recently. And I'll give you the two reasons or the two examples that popped up that caused me to start thinking why, that caused me to start thinking about the real benefit of an institutional kind of knowledge base in these situations.

And the first one was, somebody asked me recently, we have our corporation, we recently formed a planning department to go after government grants and a non-profit corporation to also bring in additional funding into our community. And someone said, ‘What made you think of that?' And the answer was, ‘Well, in '95 I was totally against it, in '96 we got a grant to do this.' So I said, 'Hey, that's pretty cool.' In '97 we didn't do anything. In '98 we got a low-interest rate loan through our own kind of efforts and we said, ‘Hey, this is a pretty good deal.' In '99, we got another one. In 2000, we got a grant to build a new office building. It was great for business because we didn't have to pay for it anymore; we got a new building. But in 2001, we learned that all these opportunities are out there that we're not tapping into. The non-profit will do it. And so one day I come back to my office on a Monday and there's a note on my computer from Friday that says, ‘Form a non-profit you big dummy.' It was to me, I wrote it because I didn't want to forget by Monday. But he asked me that question, ‘What made you think of it,' and it caused me to think, ‘Well, I didn't think of it.' It was the next step in the natural evolution of the internal knowledge base that we built up.

And the other example that integrates not just Ho-Chunk, Inc., but that integrates kind of the governmental side is, we recently just signed a groundbreaking tax agreement for gasoline on our reservation that recognizes our jurisdiction over non-Indians. And somebody said, ‘How did you do that?' And I did the same thing again. In '95 we took over the tribe's grocery store and you used to have to sign your name and write your ID number and get your refund from the state and I said, ‘We're not doing that anymore.' I said, ‘This only applies for Winnebagos,' and we said, ‘Any Indians a good Indian, we'll send you your money instead.' And so that was kind of a big deal for us. In '97, the Omaha Tribe next to us started a cigarette factory and they ruled that that's tax-free because they make the cigarettes on their reservation. I said, ‘Hey, that's pretty interesting.' In '98, they start selling gas tax-free, we supplied it to them through a loophole in Nebraska law. In '99, Iowa threatened to sue us because we were taking it to that state. So we went into negotiations, which went poorly and then they cut off our supply of fuel, which really just made me mad. And they were saying bad things about us, called us ‘shady characters.' And so we got in trouble. We called the governor and we didn't appreciate that. And so they said they would negotiate with us but they never got around to it and they didn't really...they put some feeble efforts in. And so we said, in June of 2000 after the second crack at negotiations, we said, ‘We're going to start our own tax.' And six months later we figured out a way to make it legal and essentially all we do is take the alcohol and blend it in with the gasoline on our reservation to make a charter product, similar to...and it's a manufacturing process similar to what we learned the Omaha Tribe did in '97. They made a manufacturing process and said, ‘Well, this is just our manufacturing process.' And it really threw them for a loop and we implemented kind of a political...we learned how to do that because we had a gas station business. Now, by the way, we have seven trucks and we sell 100,000 gallons of gas a day. This is like a year and a half later and we sell it to seven tribes now, but that's a different story -- all because Iowa really pissed us off.

We put together kind of...we learned how to do this from our business side but we had a legal element -- I'm a lawyer, our tribe's lawyer -- and we learned from the Omaha Tribe's legal experience in '97. And we had a growing kind of political knowledge because of the success of the tribe. And so we put together kind of a sophisticated political, legal, business-oriented strategy. We already had de facto control, we owned all the stations so we could pass any tax and apply it to us. And we offered to negotiate right off the bat. We always kept the lines of communications open. And anyway, that was in 2001, just a few weeks ago the governor signed our tax agreement that gives us, that locks in, that recognizes our jurisdiction and locks in a real good price advantage for our businesses that helps 70 of my employees keep putting food on the table. And that took years of natural kind of development both on the governmental side and both on the operational business side. And that kind of knowledge didn't just happen. People always...they come down to visit and say, ‘How'd you do it?' and really, it's a hard thing to say because it took a long time. It's a hard question to answer and this format has caused me to really think about that, how important it was to have the government stable and learning and developing relationships, how important it was for us to have a stable business environment that was learning these things and that was taking pieces from elsewhere. This strategy that we evolved would not have happened if the lawyers in a council meeting would have said, ‘Hey, we've got this problem.' They'd have said, ‘Well...' The lawyers probably would have only said, ‘This is how you'll end up in jail,' or ‘the state will do this to you,' and we probably wouldn't have went forward. But we had a business imperative to do this. We had jobs at stake, we had money at stake, and we found a way to do it using our knowledge that we had learned over a period of time and the reason we were allowed to do that is because our government is a highly stable environment.

And in summary, that's the point I want to make. In order to have any chance at long-term success, the tribes really have to structurally institutionalize continuity and that's a lot of big words in a row. But really what I mean to say is you need to change your constitution. And I'm not talking about the big changes, the ones that, the committees, the general councils, ‘We're going to go back to the old ways.' I'm talking about one simple tiny little change that will give you a chance at some of these kinds of successes. They'll be different than ours obviously, but just stagger your terms, allow your tribe the opportunity to have a chance at continuity and that will allow the natural kind of abilities and instincts and knowledge to form and flower on your reservation and that should lead to the kind of environment where these institutions develop, institutions that can take advantage of sovereignty, that get smart, that are Native American, and go forward on a cultural basis. And I realize that it's a very, very simple recommendation to make after the big introduction I got, but I think sometimes that's what you need to do, the simplest answer is the easiest. And I don't know if I have any time for questions but I'm done essentially."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"We do have time for questions, so if Lance would take a couple of questions it'd be great, so if you want to just raise your hand and pose the question to him, Lance will probably answer it. Are there questions?"

Audience member:

"Lance, in some of your fuel acquisitions and some of that, how have you dealt with kind of adverse public relations issues such as the large Petroleum Marketers Association lobbying and some other groups like that as well as the states, and you didn't mention Iowa?"

Lance Morgan:

"Oh, that's a funny question. We actually went to the...we were negotiating the tax agreement with Nebraska and the head of the motor fuels department was in our office and I said, ‘Do you want to go to a KKK meeting?' And she said, ‘What are you talking about?' I said, ‘Well, the Iowa petroleum marketers and Nebraska ones are getting together to talk about us.' And she goes, ‘Oh, I talked to them. I cleared all this up.' I said, ‘Well, let's go to lunch up there.' So we went and she's sitting...she had just said, ‘We need this information from you, I've got a report.' I said, ‘I'm not giving you that, that's going to put a gun to our head. They're going to use it against us.' And as soon as we walked in there, they started bad-mouthing Indians and they said, ‘We need to get this information. Nebraska's going to give it to us and then we can go after them.' And he said, ‘Because we could go down to the reservation and get it, but they'll probably throw you in the Indian jail. You know what that is? That's when they tie you to one of their slot machines.' And I busted out laughing. These people had no idea who I am and they're talking about they've got these lawyers and they're going to sue you if you try to say anything to them. It's basically they're just lying through their teeth to their constituents, see, and the head of the motor fuels department is sitting there. She goes, ‘I can't believe they're doing this.' I said, ‘See, this is what we're dealing with.' And so at that point she started talking in terms of ‘we.' ‘What are ‘we' going to do to deal with this kind of stuff?' And I said, ‘She's like Patty Hearst.' We were going to make her an honorary member of our tribe after that and they lost all credibility.

We took the time to educate Nebraska and then we showed them the dirty side of what we face. And the term we always use is 'jealousism,' that's our little term. It's not racism, it's jealousism 'cause they don't like it for us. We've lost our place a little bit. But we also did some other things in advance of before we started. We felt that the current taxation system was based upon the color of your skin and I think sometimes we're so used to making that distinction that we don't even think how crazy it is. You go on to the reservation, the Native American pays one price, the non-Indian pays the other. Now how in the hell is that right? Where else in America do you make a racial distinction based upon taxation? It's all about jurisdiction and it's all about...it's all about the entity. And I said, ‘We're not going to stand for this anymore' and so our PR campaign was going to be based on race. We were not going to do this anymore. If you come to our jurisdiction, you pay our tax and it sold with everybody. We had a reporter who wrote a couple weeks after we implemented our tax, on the front page of the Sioux City paper, she said, ‘A cashier...when you buy gas in Winnebago, the cashier has to determine the color of your...he knows what to charge you by the color of your skin. In Winnebago, race matters on what to charge and the Winnebago Tribe has implemented the race-neutral tax.' So we invented these terms, race-based taxation, race neutral. Republicans, they loved it. The Democrats, we give them a lot of money. So they basically backed off.

And the fact that we also were offering to negotiate...when we implemented our tax we wrote a three-page letter. The first half talked about how their legal system wasn't worth the paper it was written on and it was just very much rhetoric. And the last part talked about our strong, strong legal arguments that we put in place. The pre-emption argument, the fuel blending, the manufacturing, all these kind of things are very, very strong legal arguments on our side. We thought we had a very high chance of winning in court under this situation and at the end we said, ‘We will negotiate.' And we thought that if we said, ‘We will negotiate', that three, four, five months at least, we'd get to do this. And after a while everything died down and the state actually met with us in a very contentious relationship, contentious meeting, and when we laid out all of our legal arguments and all of the rationale behind it, they really got on board with us and then we did negotiate. The primary thing that turned the tide was we showed...on our reservation we have half the land and one third of the roads and you've got...the county got $1.6 million for excise tax money for gasoline to fix the roads and none of those roads are in our neighborhood and we got zero. So when we show our blending process and all our investment in these trucks and fuel additive things and gas stations and the people on the jobs and show how much money you're getting and how we're getting nothing, I said, ‘I can't wait to get to court with that. I said we're on a war footing.' And they said, ‘Okay.' But all this was planned. Our eventual goal internally was to get our tax agreement and that's all we wanted, that recognized our jurisdiction and we ended up getting it. But we did it with a combination of kind of PR, of political thing, of operational, of legal buffing, and it worked for us. But there was a lot of attacks along the way. But you've got to plan this out in advance.

We wrote a very interesting memo for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Tribe that balanced the business, who now have their own gasoline-blending and taxation system on their reservation. And it was not a legal memo, it was a combination legal and business memo that balanced these interests, talked about their PR strategy, talked about their legal strategy, talked about how to do this operationally, an all encompassing kind of thought process that you don't normally get in these environments. You only get those piece...tribes never quite pull those pieces together and we were lucky that we had all those pieces in our organization. And we now think strategically about how, and automatically about how to develop our sovereignty to strengthen our institutions. It's very strange, but it's kind of a natural evolution of what went on."

Audience member:

"Can you talk a little bit more about leadership in the business side of your programs and where or what is that continuity? Obviously you're a good example of continuity, but the other issue is what about other leaders within your tribe? And how is that coming with respect to, I guess, leadership development and how that works in terms of the business side of things in the different entities that you're working with?"

Lance Morgan:

"We talk about systematic approaches. We have the exact same thing on what we're doing. We have a general tribal preference of employees, but we target internally our best and our brightest. We've had every valedictorian the last several years working for us at some point, summer jobs or coming back from college. We have our own internship program. We've actually expanded to other tribes. We've had lawyers actually from a couple of other tribes come and work. They've stayed at my house and they work with us for a little while to get some insight into what we're doing. We've kind of...our internship program to me is my ability to directly nurture kind of the up and coming people. We've gotten so big now that some of our companies and departments are now going to start their internship program this year and we're just starting that so that they can have them too. We just hired one of our tribal members who just graduated, or is about to graduate from college with a computer degree to do research for us in our planning and non-profit company. And so we've kind of systemized it and now have expanded it.

On leadership on the business side, I think it's very important, and we talked about this a little before -- not here -- and I think tribes pass these corporations, they form these entities and then they just run off and they expect them to be successful. And I think the real effort needs to be when you form the entity. You have to set up principles of governance between the corporation board and the tribal government and you need to go through all the possible abilities of interaction from how do you handle your finances? How do you handle personnel? You don't want the tribe's personnel policies. You don't want to use the tribe's accounting system, you'll never get a check written; somebody won't sign it, they'll take the day off. You have to decide how you're going to send money back to the government, what you can retain. You need to do all of this stuff up front and we have a list of 10 or 12 things depending on the tribe and then once you have those, you need a leader with the courage to stick to that and hold them to it, because a lot of tribes have corporations that don't... and their CEOs are puppets and they just do what the tribal council says and they're afraid to make decisions.

I've had meetings with tribal councils where I've whipped out the long-term plan from 1994. I said, ‘Let me refresh your memory,' and I've read from it. And one of the sentences said, ‘If we did that, that would contradict the very reason for our existence.' Everyone else said, ‘Oh, yeah.' But if you don't do that up front, then you have no chance of saving it later because the tribal government is a very flexible dynamic entity. They'll adapt their mindset to whatever is politically expedient at the time, whatever they feel they have to deal with, they'll rationalize their approach to it. And so you have to stick...you have to do your homework and be willing to have the courage to stick to it and not in a disrespectful way. You don't have to do that. I have a lot of respect for our council leaders, but really sometimes you have to remind them...and since we have this kind of institutional knowledge base and memory of these things, people say, ‘Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. We can't do that,' and they deal with it some other way. And so it really isn't just leadership, it's planning and leadership and sticking to it over a period of time."

National Native American Economic Policy Summit: Lance Morgan: Policy

Producer
National Congress of American Indians and the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development
Year

The National Native American Economic Policy Summit was held in Phoenix, Arizona, May 15-17, 2007, with more than 500 key stakeholders gathering to discuss the challenges to growing healthy, vibrant Native economies. In addition to identifying challenges, participants were asked to recommend innovative and progressive solutions to foster economic growth. The highly-successful Summit, born out of a White House Intergovernmental Affairs (WHIA) initiative, was hosted by the Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development within the Department of Interior and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI).

In this video, President and CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc. Lance Morgan discusses policy.

People
Citation

Morgan, Lance. "Policy." National Native American Economic Policy Summit. National Congress of American Indians and the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development. Phoenix, Arizona. May 15, 2007. Presentation.

“This is about policy and I’ll talk a little bit about policy but I’m going to share a story with you from a couple of weeks ago. I do lots of things according to my intro and I’m of counsel to this law firm. It’s called Fredericks and Peoples and they had a meeting on a Saturday out in Denver and we were going to talk strategy. And I think that the strategy we were…their strategy they were looking for was how to build up their legal practice in Indian Country. And I think that the strategy that we talked about there is probably worth mentioning because it has some parallels to this.

We were talking about things they could focus on for their legal practice and I did this little chart. I just drew a timeline on the board and I put 1993 on one end and 2007 on the other and I drew this little graph and I said, ‘This is the era of tribal gaming. It kind of shot up in the ‘90s, it plateaued out. It’s still kind of going on but there’s a top to this and maybe there’s even a way to go down I think to some extent.’ But that’s the era of tribal gaming and I said, ‘A lot of lawyers like yourselves have ridden that wave. A lot of people have done very well on that but if you think about…’ I think we brag sometimes. I don’t know if we’re bragging or just telling people, it’s like a $23 billion industry and that’s…by our standards that’s fantastic but I read an article a week or so ago or two weeks ago on the Fortune 500. They had…those 500 companies, and there’s 500 companies and 500 tribes, it’s just coincidence I’m sure, but they had $4 trillion in revenue and $740 billion in profits, which is…their profits alone were 20 times bigger than the gaming industry, the entire industry. And so I was thinking to myself, ‘Maybe we should work on that area.’

I just kind of picked this event. When the Seminoles bought the Hard Rock Café early in the year or a year ago, I said, ‘Let’s just put a line here.’ And I drew this chart that had gaming kind of plateaued out and I just drew another chart on the board and if I was technically sophisticated you’d be looking at it now instead of this. I’m getting confused. It was really good there. And I said, ‘You know what, this is gaming, this is tribal corporation.’ I said, ‘The era of tribal corporation is about to start and we’ll say it’s with the Seminoles buying this entity. Now there’s been tribal corporations forever around here but really lately they’ve been really getting their act together and growing and think about it. Gaming is geographically limited, politically limited, a few other things but did anybody stop General Electric? Does anybody stop Exxon from growing bigger? The era of the tribal corporation has no cap on it, nothing. There’s nothing stopping it from being as big and successful as we can make it and I think that we need to understand that.’

And I was telling these lawyers, of which I’m a part of, I’m referring to them as if like they’re some creatures, these friends of mine. I said, ‘Think about every big law firm in this country. Most of these giant law firms are tied to some giant corporation. They grow with the company. And what’s interesting about it is they didn’t just grow with that company, they’ve been with that company for 50 years, 75 years, 30 years.’ Most of you aren’t lawyers but imagine having a tribal client for that long in a volatile environment, a politically charged environment and that tells you something. It tells you that we’re part of our own problem sometimes; that political establishments and governmental establishments really aren’t going to be stable over that period of time to implement these kinds of things. They’re not going to have that internal stability that it takes to create that. There’s not going to be this loyalty that you’ll see between a law firm and a company for 50 years. It doesn’t happen that way in Indian Country. I told these lawyers, I said, ‘What you need to do is you need to figure out how to help tribes put in place structures and systems that allow these thinking, evolving stable entities that can use tribal advantages to emerge and that this era of kind of tribal corporation is…there’s no…the sky’s the limit on it and we all know gaming has this limit.’

And so I was kind of…somebody asked me out in the hallway while I was writing this little chart what I was going to talk about and they said, ‘What about the entrepreneurs.’ And a lady named Margot Gray, you probably know her, she’s declared a Miss Oklahoma. She likes that. She was the Oklahoma Businesswoman of the Year a few years ago so I just kind of shortened it up to a nickname. She said, she looked at this curve and she goes, ‘You know what, when I started my business 10 years ago, we were just struggling to get by. But as this gaming took off, we grew with it. We’ve prospered as the tribes have prospered.’ And I never think much about the entrepreneurial sector because I’m very focused on the big tribal corporate thing and it occurred to me that that’s exactly true. We’ve grown, our business, even our tribal corporate business at tribes have grown, we’ve grown as a function or as a percentage of the regular industry itself. And it occurred to me that the entrepreneurs are going to grow as tribal corporations grow also. And maybe it’ll be at a factor of 10 percent or 20 percent of these but as this takes off, so will the rest of Indian Country economic, other corporations, other entrepreneurs. They’re going to follow along with it. I’ve named this curve the Margo Curve. She likes that. I really wish now I had some visual aids cause now I have three curves going. I have gaming, I have tribal corporations and I have the entrepreneurs following right behind them. But I think that that is an interesting kind of thing to understand because that is where we’re heading. It might take us awhile to get to the four trillion but interestingly it won’t take us as long if we got our act together as those corporations done because we have more advantages they do in business if we use them right.

Jackie asked me that I repeat a little bit of my speech from the RES Conference and that was in Phoenix too and I don’t like repeating speeches but I’m going to talk about something I thought was important because it ties right into these tribal corporations and I do what Jackie says. I’m kind of scared of her. She seems nice but… We usually say, ‘Let her get hold of a congressman.’ What I said there that I thought was important and it ties to this was…I talked about this tribal corporation development. What we’re seeing happening in Indian Country in some places but not everywhere is this emergence of giants. In Europe they have companies that are called National Champions. You can’t buy them because France wants that to be their big company, Germany wants that to be their big company and everything’s for sale in the United States. We just sold Chrysler. But on Indian Country we have these same things are emerging. If you think about it, there’s nothing stopping some of these tribes once they get going from becoming machines and doing super well. Southern U, they’re the Indian Exxon, they’re coming up. The Mississippi Choctaw, they’re a big conglomerate that does all kinds of manufacturing that’s branching into all kinds of areas. They’re the Indian General Electric. The Alaska Natives, they take a lot of heat for being so successful in government contracting. I was trying to figure out what government contractor to call them, I’m going to settle on the Indian Halliburton but without Dick Chaney. I can’t think of a good government, like a friendly government contractor. Oh, I’ve one, All Native Systems, it’s the company I run. We’re the company that cares about your federal tax dollars. I think that’s fascinating that these giants are going to merge. What I talked about at the RES Conference though a little bit was, I said, ‘What’s unfortunate is that so many of the rich tribes are sitting on the sidelines sitting on their hands.’ A lot of these smaller tribes have gotten their act together and are becoming hard-core business people. A lot of the rich tribes are resting on their lawyers so to speak and you’ve got enough gaming money you get a little bit soft I think and I suggest that they get hard and they start thinking more aggressively and start thinking how they can position themselves to be a much stronger entity.

I’m going to make a few policy suggestions and then…because that’s what I’m supposed to do, right. It’s kind of divergent from what I want to talk about. I’ve given speeches before on trust land. I just hate trust land. It’s the way to keep the states out of our pockets, though, right and so it’s important but I always thought…but it acts as a gigantic capital restriction device. You can’t have your own taxes, you can’t get mortgages, you can’t leverage up your land. It’s really one of the primary reasons I think we’re poor and it really hurts us in terms of taxation and capital attraction. And so I’ll make a couple of little policy suggestions and then I’ll poo poo them in a minute. The BI Loan Guarantee Program. It’s important. If you’re a rich tribe, you have a big casino in L.A. or San Diego, a bank will find a way to give you the money. If you’ve got oil, they’ve been there since the early 1900s on the Osage right, they found a way. If you’ve got nothing, they could care less. Now you still care and you still have all these restrictions of trust land but the only thing you can really do is go to the BI Loan Guarantee Program which is capped out. It’s a very small amount of money. Out of a multi-billion dollar budget it’s in the few millions of dollars that are attached to that program. And so if the only opportunity for the poorest tribes with the least resources is the BI Loan Guarantee Fund and you’re only putting in… What’s the amount that goes into that?”

“Well, we…last year we put out $108 million.”

“But what amount is allocated to it?”

“It’s about a 21 leverage so about $6 million.”

“$6 million. $6 million and $100 million is an even bigger number but that is essentially the cap on capital that can flow to 500 tribes. That ain’t a lot and so if you’re going to do it, let’s throw a few more million bucks in there. A million dollars is 20 more million, that’s better than what we’ve got. So if you’re going to make a policy change, do that at the very least. If you’re not willing to change the big picture issue on the trust land and stuff at least throw some money at the programs designed to help it.

The other issue that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine and a good friend of mine, Gavin Clarkson, is totally into this issue, is the IRS. I just don’t trust them. They’re up to something. There’s one IRS agent for every eight tribes that deal with…in that department right now just in case you’re curious. I wonder how many you would need to have that for every American or every company. So we’re probably the most, on a percentage basis or the number of companies involved, the most targeted entities out there. The IRS has really put a monkey wrench and the federal government has also put a monkey wrench in the tax exempt bond market. The tax exempt bond market is…it shouldn’t even be called that. It’s a joke. There’s no such thing and we don’t have taxes, right. So we can issue these tax exempt bonds if we have something to tie them to, casino money or something of this sort, but even that we’re restricted. They said there’s a law that says you have to do essential governmental functions. Now in the states and the counties and the cities, that can mean anything. It’s the most creative environment imaginable. For tribes it means very little. They can target you and limit you from doing things. But I’m going to make this point. Trust land means no taxes; it means that we have to go into business to make money to supplement the effects of trust land. We are forced to go into business to pay for our programs and to create jobs. So I would argue the logic that everything we do in business, and I don’t care if it’s casinos or not, is part of that ongoing obligation we have to create, to provide and that money is used to provide essential governmental services to our people. So there’s no reason that we should be…there’s no logical reason that we should be more restricted than states. In fact there’s much more reason that we should have a much more expansive environment than states. And so somebody needs to change that. It’s a couple of words in a law from the 1980s that are holding back millions of people in 500 tribes. If we want some policy changes, let’s take a shot at that one. I’ll get an eraser. Just hit delete on a couple of things. That’ll solve some problems to let the capital flow. If you’re not going to solve the trust land, then let’s do that. That can’t be that hard.

Now remember I said I’d poo poo all that, after putting out these great ideas. Those are well known ideas. Those aren’t anything new. But I’m going to tell you something. The BI Loan Guarantee Program, the grant programs associated with tribes, all of the housing programs that we have to deal with, all those things that the feds can fund, those are side effects. Those are all side effects of other things that the government has done to us. Trust land put a lock down on housing so we have to have this Indian housing program. Trust land put a lock down on capital flow so we have the BI Loan Guarantee. Trust land meant no taxes so we have to go into business and face all these other…that’s why we’re in gaming. Now we’re doing too well at that apparently so it causes problems. But if everything that we’re asking these guys to do as the governmental body, from a policy standpoint, is tied to something they’ve done to us before, I’m just thinking logically perhaps it’s not the best way to approach it because they’re not the answer. They can help, they can tweak, maybe we can make a big picture change or suggestion that will help free up some of this capital but basically all they’re trying to do, they’re treading water. They’re on a tread mill, they’re not going anywhere. Maybe they can throw a little more resources at it in an environment where resources are becoming increasingly strict, especially in the war environment.

I was telling somebody the other day, do you know that we are…that the Gulf, that this Iraq war has lasted six months longer than we were involved in World War II. I think it’s an amazing statistic. It has nothing to do with this speech by the way. I just thought it was interesting. The feds aren’t the answer. We can complain about them. Where I’m from, Nebraska, South Dakota area, it’s a cottage industry complaining about the government. I’ve heard the best speeches I’ve ever heard from tribal leaders in this area and talking about whose fault it is and it’s occurred to me that relying on these guys to solve our problems hasn’t worked for the last 100 years, that we’re functioning in a system that is very difficult for us to deal with and for themselves and so we need to forget about that. Let’s come up with some good policy ideas and let’s throw bigger band aids at the problem, right. But let’s figure out a way internally that we can get by this.

I run this little tribal corporation in a town of 1500 people. I always say there’s a herd of buffalo outside my office. We started with one employee and very little money. We don’t have this huge casino. I have 500 and some employees and we have $150 million in revenue in a town of 1500 people. It’s phenomenal what has happened in our little world. And we did it with the help of the BI Loan Guarantee programs, some of those grant things that are out there, but really that wasn’t our focus. We did it because we started focusing on internally what can we do, let’s get our governmental systems straightened out, let’s set up a corporation with a separation of politics, let’s put in place checks and balances so that people feel comfortable, let’s put Native Americans in there and let’s learn. What people don’t get is that you can’t take something from Harvard off the shelf and drop it on your reservation and think all of a sudden it’s going to be solved. What you have to do is put in place a system that you trust, that you buy into and that your own people can learn and evolve in. And if that happens, then after several years and lots of mistakes…I never talk about those. No, we’ve never made any. I’m so glad we’re not bankrupt because I was 25 when we started this. I really thought I was smart then, too.

You can evolve and I’ve given this…when people come to visit me, I tell them something. I said, I do this little timeline thing again and I said, ‘Here I thought I knew it all and here I thought I knew it all and here I thought I knew…I never did.’ But at each point I got a little bit smarter and I’m a 12 year veteran of tribal politics and tribal corporate CEO. That’s like almost unheard of. But the tribe has spent all these years teaching me and I’ve spent all this time teaching my staff. I’ve got five or six people on my staff that are qualified to run another tribal corporation. Who can say that? Because we’ve learned, we’ve evolved, we have an environment that allows that to happen and we’ve done it and our tribe has allowed us to do it. And despite all the negatives that are out there, the political targets, the attacks, the restrictions, we still found a way because we were motivated to do it and there’s nothing stopping you from doing the exact same thing. And so I would suggest that, yeah, let’s fix some policy issues but really where you need to look is inward into what you can do and to take matters into your own hands because in the end it matters far more to you than to somebody in Washington, D.C. Thank you very much.”

From the Rebuilding Native Nations Course Series: "The Politics-Enterprise Balance"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Native leaders and scholars share their thoughts about how Native nations can effectively manage the relationship between their governments and the businesses they own and operate. 

Native Nations
Citation

Grant, Kenneth. "Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises" (Episode 4). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Jorgensen, Miriam. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Spearfish, South Dakota. April 19, 2011. Interview.

Morgan, Lance. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. January 14, 2008. Interview.

Pico, Anthony. Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project for American Indian Economic Development, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 2004. Presentation.

Record, Ian. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Spearfish, South Dakota. April 19, 2011. Interview.

Smith, Jerry. "Building and Sustaining Nation-Owned Enterprises." Emerging Leaders seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2009. Presentation.

Taylor, Michael. Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 29 March 2007. Presentation.

Ian Record:

"Separated model, in many cases, it's a loaded term. It's saying, 'We're going to separate this stuff.' And it's really, 'How do you manage that relationship? How do you strike that balance to where, you know, the nation is ensuring that the business entity has the best chance of success and then the business entity in turn is ensuring that it's advancing the vision of the people and its priorities for the future?"

Anthony Pico:

"We have learned experience brings wisdom. The first rule is that businesses cannot compete successfully when the decisions are made according to tribal politics instead of business criteria. This doesn't mean that the tribe must abandon control, it means that the tribe must develop strategies and policies and execute oversight that guide the actions and decisions. The strategic question the Viejas council engages should not be, 'Who runs the mailroom?' but 'What kind of society are we trying to build?'"

Kenneth Grant:

"There's a real difficulty in separating the roles with government-owned or tribally owned enterprises, people wearing multiple hats at the same time. And so you're a citizen of the tribe and yet you're also a part owner of the enterprise. A council member is a, has governing responsibilities, is also an owner, is also a citizen. That collapsing of the distance between government and business often creates a lot of role confusion for tribes that is difficult to overcome."

Michael Taylor:

"Dividing the business operations from the politics of the tribal council is perhaps not a panacea, but it's necessary if the tribes are going to succeed with their development. And all the years that I've worked on reservations and I've worked in the tribal facility always, I've always worked directly for the tribe, the struggle has been how to figure out ways to deal with this problem. We need to develop our resources, we need to pay attention to taking those resources that we have and maximizing [them] for the benefit of our people and creating institutions that last, both governmental and business."

Miriam Jorgensen:

"You know, the challenge I think about the most, because I think it's the place that has the greatest fears raised for tribal council folks, for, you know, the political leadership, is the fear of just not knowing what's going on at that corporation. And that just means that there have to be mechanisms in that separated model for information flow, and a lot of times, initial documents that create corporations specify some of this information. It may say, you know, you have to have an annual report to us, and that annual report, you know, has to happen on such-and-such day, or the third council meeting of the year or whatever, but I think the most contemporary learning on this suggests that that's not really enough. What tribal councils need is some assurance that they're going to get information more frequently and probably a little bit more intimately. That doesn't mean that they've got the right to go in and ask the CEO of the corporation or the board of the corporation lots of questions every day all the time, but rather that the corporation has to have mechanisms that are both formal and informal for communicating adequately with tribal council to sort of say, 'Here's the stuff you need to know, and we'll give you more detailed information at our annual report time' or whatever. Different nations have handled this in different ways. I know that you've spoken with Lance Morgan, who is the one who told us what I think of as one of the best examples of this, is just offering the tribal council training for new councilors. Anytime somebody is newly elected that they get to learn about HoChunk, Inc. through a tour and an orientation. There are also tribes that require say quarterly reports that might be much shorter than say the annual reporting-in, but just to sort of update on here's where things are at. So whatever's going to work for that tribe that's not micromanagement and too much oversight, but actual good communication back that maintains the balance."

Lance Morgan:

"Well, managing a relationship between the business side and the political side is a very big deal. We've been doing it now for, I guess, almost 12-13 years. And when we started off, we had a formal set of rules. This is basically, the tribe would do this and the board would do this. And what's happened is that, as issues emerge, as we evolve as an entity, we continue to give more information. I mean everything's kind of slanted towards more sharing and more information rather than less. We still have to maintain certain differences, certain walls, you know. Things like keeping the tribe out of personnel issues and things like that -- just base, functional things that we have to do as a corporation. But in terms of the relationship, everything that we have done has gone towards more sharing and more information. And I think that as you do that, that's very helpful as long as you maintain the core differences, the core separations that allow you to continue to function independently."

Jerry Smith:

"The first lesson I learned is that maintenance of the separation of tribal governments and businesses is a very delicate balance. For example, tribal membership's demand for per capita could definitely affect you as a business. And, given the hands of people in a tribal governance role, they may have an agenda to get more money out of you. And from a business standpoint, we can only give what we can afford to give to the tribe. And so, political factors can come in and wipe you out. We don't go promote ourselves and sell ourselves as a service to anybody because, in my opinion, we're still learning how to do this, and if anybody tells you they're an expert at it, I'd like to meet them. I really would like to meet them. But what we continue to try to do is help when we're asked to help. And we've had tribes come to us and ask for help to do this, and the biggest challenge that I've run into in trying to help those tribes is the issue of control, and government does not want to give up that control, especially in tribes that already have ongoing gaming operations. And so, they'll commit to the idea of doing it, but once they understand that they can't go in and fire the manager tomorrow or go in there and do the things they're used to doing, they don't like it. So, you have to manage that every day. I mean, it's something that I have to manage every day. The governor doesn't have an authority to come in and take any actions within the operations on a day-to-day basis, but everybody knows that when the governor shows up on any one of our properties, I need to know immediately and we have somebody there to make sure that he's seen, he's getting what he needs. So you've got to manage that. You have to recognize who the owner is. And so, again, that's a delicate balance." 

Native Nation Building TV: "Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises"

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Guests Lance Morgan and Kenneth Grant explore corporate governance among Native nations, in particular the added challenge they face in turning a profit as well as governing effectively. It focuses on how tribes establish a regulatory and oversight environment that allows nation-owned enterprises to flourish, particularly the separation of day-to-day business operations from politics.

Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Building and Sustaining Tribal Enterprises" (Episode 4). Native Nation Building television/radio series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy and the UA Channel, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 2006. Television program.

Mark St. Pierre: "Mark St. Pierre. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Mark St. Pierre and welcome to Native Nation Building. Contemporary Native Nations face many challenges including building effective governments, developing strong economies that fit their culture and circumstances, solving difficult social problems and balancing cultural integrity in change. Native Nation Building explores these often complex challenges in the ways Native Nations are working to overcome them as they seek to make community and economic development a reality. Don't miss Native Nation Building next."

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[music]

Mark St. Pierre: "Today's show looks at enterprises owned by Native nations, how those enterprises are run, why many such enterprises fail, and what Native nation governments and elected officials can do to help ensure their success. With me today to discuss why some Native nation enterprises succeed and others fail are Lance Morgan and Kenneth Grant. Lance Morgan, a citizen of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, is the Chief Executive Officer of Ho-Chunk, Inc., the Winnebago Tribe's award-winning economic development corporation. Kenneth Grant is a research fellow with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and a senior policy scholar at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. I'd like to thank both of you gentlemen for being with us today. Kenny, I'll start with you. Give us a definition of tribal enterprise."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think most people think of a tribal enterprise as a company that's owned by the government, and that's not quite correct. It's a company, a business unit, that's owned by every single tribal member by virtue of the fact that they're a citizen of the tribe, and these business units typically have as their objective to earn financial returns and other social objectives that accrue to the entire community, so that all the citizens are owners and share in the benefits. So that's what I think of when we talk about a tribal enterprise."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Lance, you've developed one of the best models for tribal enterprise. What are some of the toughest challenges that tribes have to overcome?"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Well, you have to think about it terms of the situation that we have to function in, and we have a political system we didn't design, we have a system that doesn't allow capital to flow to reservations very easily, you have a poor educational system that doesn't necessarily deal with business development, you don't have a history of entrepreneurial and business success. And all of these things combine to create probably the toughest business environment in the United States."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Is one of the problems that you encounter, and this is for either one of you, separating business from tribal politics?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white">"There's a real difficulty in separating the roles. With government-owned or tribally-owned enterprises, people are wearing multiple hats at the same time, and so you're a citizen of the tribe and yet you're also a part owner of the enterprise. A council member has governing responsibilities, is also an owner, is also a citizen. That collapsing of the distance between government and business often creates a lot of role confusion for tribes that is difficult to overcome."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I once went to a conference and gave a speech there, and before I spoke somebody said, 'There are 30 government entities to help you tribes get into business.' And it occurred to me that they're helping us set up these government-led economic models, kind of the communism or socialism things that we had spent billions of dollars or trillions of dollars probably in 30 years fighting it 'cause it's inherently evil. And that's the system they had in mind for us. And I'm not so sure, I'm not going to make a comment on...at the end of the speech I said, 'I think that...I can't believe Winnebago is Karl Marx's last hope.' But I think that you have to understand the situation we're in. If we need to develop businesses, the government is really the entity with the only access to capital to do that, and so you almost have to get into this, and if you don't then you have this kind of capital-starved entrepreneur sector you've got to hope for the best with. But if you don't have that tradition or those capabilities, the government really is the only answer, so if you're going to set it up, you have to figure out a way to set it up that takes away some of the negatives of having a political entity run the business and I think that's really the challenge. You really...the tribe doesn't have a choice."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Right, exactly. And a lot of people say, 'Oh, it's separating politics from business and the fact is you can't separate the two. It's a question of how they meet and making that relationship as productive as possible."

Lance Morgan: background:white">"We're owned by government entities, so really politics plays into the decision-making to some extent. It always will. But you still have to figure out a way to balance those issues."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Those of us that have been around for awhile remember a lot of failed EDA [Economic Development Administration] attempts to create tribal enterprises. Is the climate different today than it was in the past?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think that there's a lot more success out in Indian Country in running tribal enterprises. So you can look from the Citizen Potawatami Nation to Mississippi Choctaw -- who have a plethora of successful tribally-owned enterprises -- to individual instances, whether it's Yukaana Development [Corporation] up in Alaska. You can look across the tribes, north to south, east to west, and there are examples of success, and I think Lance can speak to this better than I can, but they are becoming much more sophisticated in understanding sort of what the dangers are and how to promote business and run these operations."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "You referred to kind of the old grant-based economic development model, and I think that that's still an important part of it, but we need to...we've transitioned I think, or the challenge of transition is away, from the grant as our only development tool. What we did is we ran kicking and screaming from anything to do with the government for the first seven or eight years we were in business. And then it occurred to us when we wanted more capital that, hey, maybe we should go back and dust off the old grant model, and we've been able to raise grant money, but it's a supplement to what we're trying to do and it gives us some of the startup capital we need and we're not dependent upon it. And I think it's still a tool that you need to [use] but -- as you grow in sophistication -- that it really factors into your decision-making, it doesn't drive it."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Kenny, you've worked with a lot of tribes. Why do you think so many enterprises have failed?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think part of it is there are issues that are particular to each tribe. Let me put it this way. I think the most insidious problem that I've seen -- working with tribes and trying to run tribal enterprises -- is when the tribe and the citizens think it's an operational problem, when really it's an institutional problem. So I'll give you a quick example of working with one tribe where they had a plethora, I mean just a whole bunch of human capital, great natural resources, access to financial capital. These were very, very well-educated people, and yet the tribal enterprises kept falling. If you talk to the tribal citizens they'd say, 'Well, we just haven't been as civil as we used to be, or people aren't following the procedures book -- and there's this big procedures book.' Or the opposition would say, 'If I were in power all of this problem would go away.' In fact, what you saw is that there were really big disputes that had never been resolved because they had no tribal court system and these disputes were creating distrust and they would just bring an operation to a standstill. A council meeting would just come to an end. And so it wasn't really about civility, it was really about the foundation and the institutions. And that's the toughest problem is when you think it's just our accounting isn't in order, when in fact it's really about how the institutions are operating."

Lance Morgan: background:white">"Yeah, I'd like to add to that a little bit. I think that people tend to simplify the problems, and they focus on whatever bad thing happened at that time and they try to allocate blame, and some people try to do that for their own political gain and all these kinds of things, so you have a tough kind of local political environment. But if the people would take the time to say, 'All right, if we're having this problem over and over again, there's probably some reason for it.' And I always recommend, when tribes come to visit us, that they look at their government structure, they look at their corporate structure, and they figure out in advance what their challenges are going to be and try to plan for them in advance. If they do that, then their chances of success in avoiding these kinds of constant cycles of problems are much higher."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "To follow up, Lance, then what are some of the things that Native Nations need to look at to build success?"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Ho-Chunk, Inc. is really the second attempt. Winnebago Industries was our first attempt in the 1980s, and that pre-dated me a little bit, but when we got there and we decided that we wanted to set up a new corporation, we sat down and we said, 'What are all the reasons we failed before?' 'Cause we have a long history of failure in some of these businesses, and we listed them out and we tried to design a system that would allow us to actually deal with some of those things right up front, and I think that's probably a pretty important step."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "That statement reminded me of a speech that Chairman [John "Rocky"] Barrett gave at Native Nations Institute maybe four or five years ago now, and he was talking about his economic development plan. He's chair of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and he said, 'My constitution is my economic development plan,' meaning, 'I wanted to get the institutions right, I wanted to sort of be able to lay the foundation. That was my goa. Then let the economic activity flourish.'

Lance Morgan: background:white"> 'It's not even a difficult thing to really figure out how to address [that], because you can almost go to any -- ask a tribal leader and economic development person, 'What are your problems?' And they can list them out in detail, and they're almost the same as everybody. But why not take a little bit extra time and put your institutions in place to deal with some of those problems right up front?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "The one place I might have a little disagreement is the problems are often known, but when you're talking about changing systems, that can be a very difficult process, because people have gotten used to the system that they have, they know how it operates, and so trying to transform those institutions can be a real challenge."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Oh, it's actually...it can actually not just be a challenge, it can be dangerous because I think you can do things -- I've seen some tribes do some things that are actually counterproductive, and they do it in the name of maybe some kind of ode to a traditional practice in the past, but it really doesn't make sense in a modern contex. And I've seen some tribes do some things, set up governmental structures that really sounded good and sounded like a great idea but in practice have been a real impediment towards their growth and development."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "And I think it's interesting that the first part of this conversation has really focused more on foundational issues about institutions -- and we can get into the operational issues of the tribal enterprise -- but clearly you can see where Lance and I are going about getting the environment right in which the enterprise can then begin to perform."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Well, that kind of leads to a logical question, I think, and that is that Lance listed at the beginning some of the obstacles that are very real that every tribe face, especially the larger tribes, larger populations. What are some of the factors that tribes can control?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I sort of come at it from the economics and I look and I say, 'Okay, there's the market out there and there's much that the tribal enterprise can't control. They have to go out and compete against other companies that are providing the same services and then there's policy over here and tribal policy, maybe they've got some say in there but there's not too much control and then there's federal policy.' So I look at it from the economics and say, 'What they really can control is their operations. Are their operations running efficiently, the accounting and the reporting, the board structure?' That's really what they have within their own control."

Lance Morgan: background:white">"I think that's right, but I think what we've done is we've had a tendency to look for some advantage. I always joke that...all of a sudden we're all business experts because of gaming, but I think that it doesn't take a huge sophistication I think to make a lot of money in gaming if you're right next to a big city and you have a monopoly. But what we've had to do is find niches where we have not as huge an advantage as gaming but some advantage over our competition, and there's huge advantages being a tribe. You have your own governmental jurisdiction, you can make your own rules, you can get preferential treatment on some contracts, maybe you can get some start-up capital from various places. So we've tried to focus on areas where if we make a mistake learning, that it's not going to kill us, and that if we get our act together, we should be able to long term have a viable entity because we have some inherent niche or some inherent kind of advantage in that market."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Mark, I'll just follow up. That's a great point and that's a lesson that's seen over and over and over again, is exploiting these small niches where there's a comparative advantage for the tribe and then growing that. You can see it in Yukaana Development Corporation, which is an environmental remediation group up in Galena, Alaska. Very focused on a few issues, they basically have their teams all over Alaska now. The Cherokee Tribal Sanitation Program run by the Eastern Band [of Cherokee], servicing first their own community, then got so good at it went out and signed contracts with neighboring jurisdictions so that they provide waste facilities, a transfer station for their neighboring communities, and they sort of grow off this seemingly little niche but they learn the game and then grow."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I don't think it's a coincidence that tribes everywhere are involved in gaming, are involved in gasoline- or tobacco-type issues. Those are kind of the stereotype economic development issues. And what those really are, if you think about them, they're not inherent Indian businesses. What they really are are businesses that you can get into and take advantage of having a jurisdiction or a different tax base or making a decision on gaming, for example, that another place doesn't. And so I think the challenge is -- or I recognize that these are jurisdictional advantages and we're going to develop our businesses. The challenge for us has been, all right, these businesses are controversial, they create clashes with the state, they create competitive threats that people don't like, and our challenge has been to figure out how we take the money we've made and move to the second stage. How do we take that money and get into home manufacturing, get into construction, get into government contracting, those kinds of things, things that take full advantage of being a tribe but aren't nearly as controversial and aren't a stereotyped business. I think then that's been the challenge for us."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "This is for Lance, but Kenny if you want to jump in as well. A lot of folks, tribal people are very concerned about the job issues and the whole issue of jobs versus profits and the social impact of tribal enterprises and I'd like you to talk about that for a minute."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "When we started our company, we created two missions. We have two primary goals, and one is to create economic self-sufficiency and the other one is to create job opportunities. I think that we've had a lot...before we started we had a long history of kind of having businesses there and we kept them open even if they weren't necessarily profitable because of the jobs issue, and I always kind of thought that was kind of a bit of a cop-out for poor management or poor decision-making or poor governmental structure. I think that if you don't have the profits, you're not really going to have the jobs for a long-term, sustainable period of time, and so I think you really need to focus on developing a successful business. If you do that, the jobs will follow. If we would have, for example, made the decision early on to keep a business that was failing open, that capital would have...we would have had to supplement that business over a period of years and it would have prevented us from making other decisions further on that would have been very helpful for us. And so by focusing on the real economic development issues, we now have more jobs than working-age people in our community. So I think if you focus on success everything else will follow."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Kenny, would you like to respond?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I agree. I think in some sense it's a false dichotomy, but I think Lance is absolutely right that you have to...if the goal is sustainable, ongoing economic activity, the tribal enterprise is going to be here for today, tomorrow, five years, then the focus has to be on profit and then the industry that you go into, the service you provide, or the product that you make will then dictate the number of jobs that are allowed, 'cause you can't force 20 jobs into a position where the market really only allows one job, but if you want that job to sustain itself, then it has to be the focus on profits."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I think the key decision upfront is does your tribe need the jobs? Some tribes necessarily don't. If you do need the jobs, then you have to go into businesses that are labor intensive and then try to be successful there. So the real decision is up front in what type of industries do you want to go after or try to develop."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "I would think, too, that the grant mentality of the two- or three-year jobs based on a grant cycle versus long-term jobs created by real enterprise and real profits are kind of an adjustment that tribal citizens have to make, especially for those tribes that have been invested in that grant economy."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I would agree. I think a lot of times what you're doing is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Those grants are coming from Washington. So you know the old EDA hotels. It just was the wrong enterprise, and that's not what should have been going, but the money was there, and so there's this sort of predilection to want to go get that money and do that enterprise even though the tribe may not have a regulatory advantage, it may not have a business or a competitive advantage, and they fail and that sort of begins a cycle of..."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I think if you don't have a clearly defined strategy, that you're likely to make some mistakes on the grant side of things. These grants are written to say do certain things, but we have found that if you come forward with a very well-conceived plan and they have trust that you're going to do it, that the government entities on the grant side are very flexible. If they believe in what you're trying to do, they will modify their system to help you accomplish your goal. So I think the real key is to figure out exactly what you want to do and make sure that that makes sense and get other people to buy into [it]. Then you can spin the system to help you."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Right. But notice in that case whose leading. Here's the tribe saying this is...or the enterprise saying, 'This is where we want to go. This is our goal and are there grants out there that will fit into this process,' as opposed to, 'the grant is out there so we'll do whatever the grant says we're going to do.'"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Yeah, you've got to flip the equation so that you're in the power position."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Lance, kind of on that same plane though, there's one of the fears out there that as tribes thrive rather than survive that the culture is going to be eroded, that as tribes move into a more professional business model that somehow cultures or tribal cultures are going to die."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Yeah. That's really a major challenge that especially I think young Native American professionals are facing right now. I've always said that culture is really based on a lifestyle based on how you live, and that's based on economics and I think that tribes have a tendency to stereotype themselves based on a positive image that we had of ourselves 100 years ago. But those cultural things, some of those values carry forward, but some of the things that they did were based on a different economic reality, and so I think we need to figure out a way to do Native values like taking care of your family, sharing in your community, but figure out how to be successful in a modern context. I think too often somebody will stand up in a meeting, make a speech about culture and it'll kill a project, and I don't think that that's probably the...and I think then they pat themselves on the back for being pure and then nothing happens and people still aren't able to take care of their families. I also think it's used to make young Native professionals feel bad. You question yourself all the time: Am I doing the right thing? Who am I now? And I think we need to try to embrace success and really figure out what the context of what part of our culture do we want to take forward and reapply it in a modern context. And I think that's the core challenge we're facing."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "This came up once in a classroom with Chief Phillip Martin, Mississippi Choctaw, and I will never say it as eloquently as Chief Martin said, but basically his point was, through our success we actually have citizens returning to the reservation, and so the people are coming back and now they have the language programs and all the sort of benefits that are accruing from being financially successful through their tribal enterprises. So he's sort of saying, 'How's that destroying my culture when I have all my people coming back?'"

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "Our culture 20 years ago was one of poverty and all the 'isms' you could think of, all the negativisms, alcoholism and all these kinds of things, and our culture's changed. When we first started our corporation we had this discussion, 'Do we really want to be like corporate America?' And we didn't want to. Do we really want a change? But what's really happened is, as the economy has flowered, as people's lives have gotten better, cultures take on a renaissance. Things like the alcoholism and the drug abuse and some of the social issues have begun to die down and people are much more focused on getting back in touch with who they are and taking more pride in themselves and I think that's a pretty critical...that's something I guess I didn't think through, but that's something that's definitely happened in the last 10 years in our community."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "I'm going to change direction a little bit here now, and I think we're talking about exciting things. We're talking about thriving. But in order to get that to happen, you need to create some separation between tribal politics or tribal governmental structures and business enterprises. Could you address some ideal ways where that distance can be structured?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think I will start from the global view. I don't think there's one way. I don't think that there's a silver bullet here. I think it's particular to the situation. I have seen some tribes and some tribal enterprises that basically rely on a strong CEO and a good relationship with the council. I've seen other tribal enterprises such as the Yakama Nation Land Enterprise has a board that is essentially a subcommittee of the tribal council and that works for them. In other instances, there are formal boards of directors essentially that stand between the government and the enterprise, and so they're sort of making sure the enterprise is reporting to the council and they're helping the enterprise set strategy."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "I think the key for us, the real key is -- one of the main keys I think -- is having a political system that is very helpful, it's very stable. We have nine council members and three are elected every year and usually only one or two change over so we never have this huge kind of change in at-the-top strategy level, and the new people that come in, even if they're kind of curious or suspicious about what we're doing, kind of have a time to adjust and they learn, 'Okay, this isn't so bad.' And so that gives us a stable political environment to work in. Within that we have a board of directors -- we have a tribal corporation, we have a board of directors, the council appoints the board, they passed our long-term plan and they approve our annual plan. That's really their only job. They only have three roles. The board has all the other roles and then myself as CEO makes sure the business functions. And so we have clearly defined roles and we stick to them and we occasionally have to pull out the old long-term plan from '94 and dust it off and read it in a council meeting and that's been pretty helpful for us."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Yeah, getting people to stick to their roles is the challenge, 'cause many times I've seen boards have really just become advisory boards and the CEO is reporting to the council because over time people have moved away from the agreement that they originally set down."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "What we did is -- I mentioned earlier that we had listed all the reasons for our failure and we added an additional part to it. We took an additional step and I think that's been the key. We developed something we now call -- then it was the long-term plan -- but we're a little more sophisticated now, we call it the 'principles governing the interaction between the tribe and the corporation,' and we have this list of rules based on the reasons we failed before. For example, we failed because we had to go to the council for every dollar we got. So we said, 'All right, the tribe is going to give us 20 percent of the casino profits in an account that the board controls so we don't have to go to the council so every investment decision isn't politicized. We failed once before because the tribe would suck out all the money from the corporation just because they had needs to...social needs to spend it on.' But the tribe said, 'All right, for the first five years, you get to keep all of your money, and then now we're giving 10 percent of our profits back gradually up to 20 percent. We have a system in place. We failed because of personnel issues. We created our own personnel system. We failed 'cause of the lack of accounting systems, accounting was in the tribe's. We have our own accounting system. So we figured out up front and established all these rules, and every once in awhile we have to read these things and remind the council of it and everyone gets back onboard and we move forward."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "That leads to another logical question I guess. The Harvard Project and the Native Nations Institute research says that dispute resolution and having a good organ to do that is important."

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "Well, it gets back to the politicization that we were talking about earlier and creating the unstable environment and what the dispute resolution does is it helps hold that in check. People have a place to go to resolve the dispute and if the mechanism is seen as fair, it helps hold the politics of spoils in check. That makes it easier for the tribal enterprise to attract the human capital and the financial capital that it needs to operate successfully."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "We don't have a lot of problems on the dispute-resolution side with our individual businesses. Our primary dispute is balancing the separation with the government and the business and we really, since we're owned by them, we really have to figure out ways to get along with them. And so our disputes are played out kind of through negotiation typically, and I think that if we ever really got into a fight with our owner we would probably lose. They could pass laws, they can make motions, they can change the board, so our challenge is to educate people and to get them onboard with our long-term concepts and make them a believer in what we're trying to do."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "And that's the follow up: How do you do that? How do you educate the tribal citizens who are also the tribal politicians eventually in this process?"

Kenneth Grant: background:white"> "I think it speaks to the issue of transparency, and that doesn't mean that every decision that Lance makes is open for review or put up to a vote by the citizens, but it is keeping people aware of what the mission of the operation is, how it's performing, what its financial returns are, what its goals are, and I do think that the political leadership has a role in helping to educate the tribal citizens and the owners of the enterprise."

Lance Morgan: background:white"> "One of the things we do is we have a mechanized system for putting information out to the people and to the government. We have to provide audited financials every year and an annual report and we even had a PR campaign, kind of a sophisticated thing which really was kind of a failure I think. I think what's really helped us is really going out and directly talking to our membership. One on one we've brought in our employees, we've kind of given them a fact sheet about what we do and given them information, they go home, talk to their families and we deal with kind of the little negative issues that emerge in a small community and I think our sophisticated PR strategy and press releases and all that stuff really didn't work until we started talking to our people."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Sadly, we're running out of time, but I'd like to do one final question for both of you. This is exciting stuff. Where do you see it headed?"

Kenneth Grant: " background:white">I think there's been a tremendous change in the last 20 years, and I think more and more examples of success are breeding more and more success within Indian Country on operating tribal enterprises. I think it's one of the biggest changes we've seen in the last 20 years, and I think the trend is very, very positive."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "Where is Ho-Chunk?"

Lance Morgan: "Our challenge is to continue to transition from these controversial businesses to these businesses that take advantage of being a tribe, and really make a lot of money hopefully and we can take that money and funnel it towards our community in a social kind of side of the equation. I think that what I don't want to get lost in this [is] it's not really, it's never really about the money. We're never going to be Microsoft. We're a company that is focused on making our community better, and I think the more we realize that ourselves, the better off we are. So I think the future for us, drive the business forward, be as great as we can, as competitive as we can, and figure out ways -- challenging and interesting ways -- to spread the wealth in our community so that everybody benefits from it. And I think that in the end is going to be the key to our longevity there, because that's what's going to engender I think good feelings towards the tribe."

Mark St. Pierre: color:#222222;background:white"> "I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to both you guys for traveling here. I'd like to thank Lance Morgan and Kenneth Grant for appearing on today's edition of Native Nation Building, a program of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Native Nation Building and the issues discussed here today, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at www.nni.arizona.edu/nativetv. Thank you for joining us and please tune in for the next edition of Native Nation Building."

How Tribal Leaders Are Creating Jobs

Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) has provided a vital spark to infrastructure and economic development projects across Indian country. Momentum has been building over the past several years but because of recent federal agency actions, and now tax-related Congressional bickering, it is in danger of petering out.

Out on the prairie, the skyline of Winnebago, Nebraska continues to grow. That is because the Winnebago Tribe is constructing a new multi-million-dollar educational center. This is a major achievement for a community in great need. Any other rural community might have issued bonds based on local property tax revenues to construct a critical community asset like this. But of course tribal governments cannot levy real property taxes. As such, NMTC-backed financing helped make this project a reality...

Resource Type
Citation

Morgan, Lance and Gabriel S. Galanda. "How Tribal Leaders Are Creating Jobs." Indian Country Today. October 15, 2013. Opinion. (https://ictnews.org/archive/how-tribal-leaders-are-creating-jobs, accessed July 18, 2023)

Indian Pride: Episode 108: Economic Development

Producer
Prairie Public
Year

This episode of the "Indian Pride" television series, aired in 2007, explores the economic development efforts of selected Native nations cross Indian Country. It also features an interview with Lance Morgan, CEO of the Winnebago Trib'es Ho-Chunk, Inc., who provides an overview of the evolution of Ho-Chunk, Inc. and how it is working to grow and diversify the Winnebago Tribe's economy in order to make it sustainable.

People
Resource Type
Citation

Prairie Public. "Indian Pride (Episode 108): Economic Development." Indian Pride television series. Prairie Public. Fargo, North Dakota. 2007. Video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFibj75MUi0, accessed July 24, 2023)

Indian Pride: Episode 108: Economic Development

Producer
Prairie Public Broadcasting
Year

Indian Pride, an American Indian cultural magazine television series, spotlights the diverse cultures of American Indian people throughout the country. This episode of Indian Pride features Lance Morgan, President and CEO of Ho-Chunk, Inc., the economic development corporation of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and focuses on the topic of economic development in Indian Country. (Segment Placement: 1:06-15:08)

People
Citation

"Economic Development." Indian Pride (Episode 108). Prairie Public Broadcasting. Fargo, North Dakota. 2007. Television program. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFibj75MUi0, accessed September 26, 2012).