Sharon Day

Sharon Day, Shawn Frank and Deborah Locke: Disenrollment (Q&A)

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Panelists Sharon Day, Shawn Frank, and Deborah Locke field questions from the audience and a few participants offer their closing thoughts on the question of tribal citizenship and identity. 

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

Resource Type
Citation

Day, Sharon. "Disenrollment (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Frank, Shawn. "Disenrollment (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Locke, Deborah. "Disenrollment (Q&A)." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

Matthew Fletcher:

"My wife, Wenona Singel, wrote a paper where I think I've learned more from this paper than anything else I've read and she...two points about the paper I think that are important. The first is...the paper's called "Indian Tribes and Human Rights Accountability" and it seems to me that there is a -- seems to her and I agree -- that there's a gap in human rights coverage and the gap applies to Indian tribes. International law obligates nations to guarantee minimal human rights and there are things in the United Nations Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples], for example, that include these kind of principles, but they don't apply to sub-nations like Indian tribes and so tribes ostensibly have no outside accountability for some of the things they do. That's one of the reasons we have the lack of federal court jurisdiction over things like tribal membership issues is an issue. The other thing is the question of sovereignty and Indian tribes assert sovereignty over tribal membership decisions and if you think about sovereignty, the same kind of arguments that tribes are asserting now when they're defending themselves from challenges on questions of disenrollment are exactly the same things that the southern states made when they were challenged over slavery prior to the Civil War. And if you read the Dred Scott case, there's a long rambling dissertation in there about sovereignty, how internal governance matters should be left to the states alone and outsiders shouldn't have anything to say over that. So I just wondered if you wanted to... if that inspired any commentary from anybody."

Shawn Frank:

"I just think in terms of the sovereignty issue -- maybe I shouldn't answer this since it's framed versus an exercise tantamount to endorsing slavery -- but I think the tribes do have that authority and they can take actions pursuant to that authority. I think the question becomes of whether or not they should, but I certainly...one of the things I do believe is that tribes have to exercise their sovereignty in certain regards because what good is being a sovereign nation with independent authority in certain instances if you're not willing to exercise it? And I think that in issues of membership, that's an important exercise of a tribe's sovereign authority. And I think kind of getting back a little bit to kind of one of the themes of Sharon's [Day] presentation was I think Indian nations are in an interesting position because you have these traditional notions -- not notions, that makes it sound quaint -- these traditions of clans and kinship and where things were really fluid and loose, but as tribes became more like western governments and they adopted constitutions and laws, the tribes now are required to follow those constitutions and laws and sometimes they don't allow this sort of traditional healing, community togetherness concept because there are specific criteria in the specific things that tribes have adopted. So it's kind of a desire sometimes to get back to more kinship and inclusive thing, but the tribes by their own adoption of some constitutions and some other ordinances have really prevented that from being able to happen."

Sharon Day:

"But sovereignty also means that they could do that as well, they could move in the direction that I was referring to if they so choose. That's sovereignty, that's exercising sovereignty."

Audience member:

"After hearing everything that was presented today, I often wonder what the 570-some tribes throughout the United States that are going through enrollment issues, that if there could ever be a conference or a reunification of Indigenous tribes here, not just the continental United States, but the South American, Canadian come together and look at what has...so that there'd [be] a standardization hopefully maybe within the tribes, so that we'd send a message say to the federal government, to the Department of the Interior that we all have the same standards, that's what we're going to abide by. I think we're all going through the decolonization as Sharon was saying and we're still gun shy in what we do. Why? Because we're only one tribe amongst nations of many others and to set a precedence, not just for our tribe, but other tribes here have different things. For instance, they were talking about citizenship and that presentation. Well, if you don't reside on a reservation you don't get any of the benefits. And there again the question was, well, you get benefits, but you have pride in being a tribal member. And often we all say that what's good enough for one tribal member is good for all whether it be the benefiter or etc.

And so I think as a short-term goal probably within say even a year is try to get the message out to all the tribes in the United States, come together somewhere say centrally located, Oklahoma, Nebraska, whatever, come together and have a large summit. That would be a dream and if we go with the clan systems or a way of life, which our people followed many years ago that...whatever, it'd work out to be the best because...me and Willard went to Las Vegas for an enrollment issue and listened to that and we hear different perspectives on enrollment; you hear good stories, you hear sad stories, you hear pondering stories. You're like, 'Okay, I've got my head scratching, I'm thinking,' but you have to know your people also. Ms. [Deborah] Locke was talking about what happened to her and that could very easily fit a lot of tribes throughout the United States and nobody likes to open up Pandora's box to what legalities would come out of that. But the big thing is I'd love to see a summit because if we make these changes today, we're going to leave a legacy for our children and I still think that our children will still be looking at this issue down the line going into the 22nd century. [Anishinaabe language]."

Sarah Deer:

"Any other questions or comments for the panel? I guess we have a lot to think about. Well, let's thank our panel for speaking...for joining us today."

Audience member:

"Well, actually before we clap I guess, we're hoping to get a copy of your article because we'd like to..."

Sharon Day:

"I'll send it to Colette [Routel] and she can send it."

Audience member:

"...Because we'd like to include that into our newsletter and I think...I really enjoyed your presentation..."

Sharon Day:

"Thank you."

Audience member:

"...As a member of the lodge, it's good to have our grandmothers stand up and remind us of the different things that we have. And it's...one of the things I've always enjoyed about when I worked at White Earth is that even though it's a different place there's the common teachings that exist and it's good to know that, John Borrows talked about when you identify your clan you have that connection, so for us in the lodge is that understanding because one of the things that they teach us is the unconditional love, it's to be able to accept them as they are and respect all ways. I guess I do have a comment.

So one of the things I hope that...I hope for not just as a tribal attorney, but as a tribal member is that there is an effort to try to educate our tribal members to understand...someone presented about tribal civics and we talked about this in some of the council meetings, we've talked about this on the reservation about having an opportunity to teach ourselves what our government is like, because there's such a distrust that's come from this federal model and that people who are afraid of trusting authority automatically attack our tribal model and that undermines us because it's...but for the fact that we have these treaties that exist because there's no such thing as an individual sovereign, there's the idea of tribal sovereignty. People will attack our governments because they don't like to be told 'no,' but they don't know what to do to try to get to 'yes.'

I think sitting at this table...I try to remind our council...because I studied this when I was a kid growing up. My dad was someone who was very vocal and involved in this type of work and then when I went to college and I went to the Marine Corps, I went to law school, you keep the sense of identity of who you are and it attaches to your tribe, but more for me it was attaching to who my family was. I'm a junior so I carry myself in the way that knowing that my actions reflect on my dad, but they also reflect on my family and that's a teaching that we have in our lodge and that. So for me citizenship is kind of really difficult for me to understand because I'm always going to be a member of my family and [Anishinaabe language], means 'all my relations.'

And so when one of our family members walks on in our lodge, and I know this is taught in other lodges, someone else needs to stand up and do their work because that work needs to get done. And so that's what I envision and that's what I've seen growing up on the reservation, me and Willard. We've kind of been joking with him the whole day about trying to get him to speak, but I grew up with Willard and as we get older we take more of these responsibilities and among the people that I grew up with we say, 'It's our time. It's our time to do this work now. It's our time to look to our elders like Gordon and Rusty and the ones who've opened up this path for us. It's time for us to pick up that...' Well, they probably don't want to drop it right now, but they're ready for us to start doing this work and helping them carry it that much farther so that our children have an idea of where they come from. But we have to start...I think we need to do more to trust the governments that we have and trusting them by understanding what their role is, understanding where the root of the idea of sovereignty comes from, understanding what the role of the government is supposed to be so that just because you get a negative decision, and I don't mean that in reflection of anything that's been said today, but you understand the purpose of what it is. You have to protect the identity and the protection that we have as a collective group because for every negative instance we have there's a positive instance of a negative action from a government. And I say that as a lawyer.

But people...some tribes sell their memberships and they sell it to people who can pay whoever is on council to do that or they sell the right to go hunt and fish and those are things that are not intended as those treaties were done. My dad used to...my dad told me, 'One of the major things about the treaties was Article 5 of the '37 Treaty.' He said,  ''42 was the best one negotiated for the Ojibwe's, but Article 5 is the one that encompassed us the right to hunt, fish and gather as the way we understood that because hunting, fishing and gathering was the instrument and the means for us to get the deer, the wild rice, the fish and the plants and the medicines for us to have our ceremonies. And for us to have our ceremonies allowed us to go from birth to passing with all the ceremonies that go on in between there and that allowed us to keep our connection between our ancestors and we have something to give to our grandchildren. And that maintains our identity as Ojibwe and as Anishinaabe.' And so when I get an opportunity to teach in the schools I talk about that, but I try to put a face on that.

Gordon was the chairman for our tribe when we had the void litigation that opened up this idea of reaffirming our rights in the 7th Circuit and also in the Western District of Wisconsin. Rusty has been a 20-year veteran in the Army. And so we need to do more to recognize the contribution of our individual members and when they sit on council it's not just 'f*in' council did this' or 'f*in' council did that.' What it means is that we have people who have made a sacrifice of their personal selves to put themselves in a leadership position to take the responsibility of what happens and then respect them for their contribution instead of saying, 'Well, their family did this or their family did that.'

When I took the job as the tribal attorney, I stood in front of the council and said, 'I will let go of my responsibilities as my family and not carry the grudges going forward and I will serve my council to the best of my ability to carry that forward,' and I've tried my best to do that. You've got pressures that come all the time, but I think if we're going to really have a serious conversation about what citizenship is, whether it's the political discourse or membership, whether it's belonging to that group, you have to have an idea of what is your responsibility to contribute and not just expect something in return, not just to say, 'Well, I get to go hunting and fishing because that's my treaty right.' That treaty right came at the sacrifice of thousands of people who had to sneak in the woods at night because there was people who were trying to take that away from them. I read the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] reports, I've seen the game warden reports from like 1910 when they confiscated the fish and the deer from this old elderly couple from Lac du Flambeau and the father...the male died in custody and they made the mother walk home from the lake that she was at. You would never even think about doing that now. You would never, ever contemplate doing that, but that's a sacrifice that they did so that...we need to remember those stories and they did that because...they did that to survive, but I bet you their children knew how to hunt, fish and gather and they knew how to speak their language and they understood those seven principles that come from your teaching in the lodge and they understand what the seven fires are.

And I hope that if there's some day that we have that conversation so there is a thread that connects us so that we never forget the sacrifice of who we are and what's been done to give us that chance. And I hope that we are able to make that same sacrifice so that our grandchildren can look back and say, 'Well, there was this fat guy at a conference one time who said...kept jabbering on, everybody wanted to go home...' but at least we keep that connection alive. So that's what I would say. And I say [Anishinaabe language] for your teaching."

Sharon Day:

"[Anishinaabe language]."

Sarah Deer:

"Thank you." 

Sharon Day: Disenrollment: Contemplating A More Inclusive Approach

Producer
William Mitchell College of Law
Year

Sharon Day (Bois Forte Band of Chippewa) makes a compelling case for Native nations to abandon externally imposed criteria for citizenship that continue to cause internal divisions within Native nations and communities and instead return to Indigenous cultural values and teachings predicated on unity, inclusion and love.

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

People
Resource Type
Citation

Day, Sharon. "Disenrollment: Contemplating A More Inclusive Approach." Tribal Citizenship Conference, Indian Law Program, William Mitchell College of Law, in conjunction with the Bush Foundation. St. Paul, Minnesota. November 13, 2013. Presentation.

"[Anishinaabe language]. So I just want to start by telling you a little story.

In 1984 or 1985 -- I'm not exactly sure when -- I went to Nicaragua as a member of a LGBT work study brigade. There was about four of us, we went to Nicaragua and we stayed with families in León and we took medical supplies because of course there was a U.S. embargo against Nicaragua. And so they couldn't get medical supplies or if they had a John Deere tractor that needed parts they couldn't get parts and none of those kinds of things. And it was actually the sixth anniversary of the revolution there. One of the towns that was near León was a little place called Subtiava and Subtiava was the birthplace of [Augusto César] Sandino who was...the Sandinista pattern themselves after Sandino and that was the beginning of the revolution.

So when I went to Subtiava, they had a cultural center, a museum and it was the only cultural museum in Nicaragua. And so I asked the people there, ‘Who...' because I was trying to figure out like how are they Indian, because they said Sandino was an Indian. So, ‘Who lived in Subtiava?' ‘Anybody who wanted to.' ‘Well, how do you govern yourself?' ‘Well, we have a council.' ‘Well, who can vote for the council?' ‘Whoever lives in Subtiava.' And this was like, what? Like how can this be because of course in our reservation systems who can live on the reservation, who can vote in the election, all of that's very tightly regulated, right? And so here's this community, an Indigenous community, in Central America where everything was just so open.

And so I was still having a...'Well, maybe they're not Indian after all.' And so I asked them, ‘Well, what do you do in terms of like...do you use like traditional medicine?' ‘Oh, yeah.' And so they showed me some of their medicines and they said, ‘In fact, right down on the beach a little ways up the coast we had a medical school where we train traditional practitioners in how to heal people before the Spaniards came and there was maybe...it was a school and we had 100 people there.' And one of the first things that the Spaniards did was burnt down that traditional medical facility. So then they pulled out all their land claims maps, like that I could understand. Same as us, right? But it was...this was 1985 and this is very...this changed a lot of the way that I thought about Indigenous people.

So I'm not a lawyer, I worked for the state for a number of years and had to deal with some state-tribal law for about 10 years and had some many good discussions there with especially the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and who as a result the tribe...the state had to change their contracts with tribes, all their language. But you know what, as tribal people, we had a governance system prior to 1492. We had a system of governing ourselves and this system of governance really for the Ojibwe people involved our clan system. And so there were clans and myself, I already told you I'm [Anishinaabe language], and where we sit in the lodge is in the western doorway and our job is to protect the people. And so ever since I was a little child I could hear my dad saying, ‘Your job is to take care of your family, your clan, your band, the tribe, all Indigenous people and ultimately all of humanity.' Now I've been lucky all my life to be able to work in positions that have enabled me to do that.

We all have clans and there's sub-clans, but these are the major clans that governed, took care of things and some years ago we started a small charter school in Minneapolis. It was called Native Arts High School and it operated for about three years and we couldn't make it go financially, but the way that we planned everything was that we had the students broken up into clans and if there was a dispute, the clans got together and they made a decision. And if they couldn't decide then we went to the Fish Clan because they were the philosophers and they ultimately made the final decision. When that decision was made, that was it. So I guess they were sort of like the Supreme Court.

And so we also have these seven grandfather teachings, and I know among the Lakota and Dakota they also had a system. They had these very same values with the addition of fortitude because life out there on the plains is a little more difficult and so fortitude is something that is one of their values. And so you can't practice...you can't choose which of these values you're going to practice, which of these values you're gong to incorporate in your life because if you don't practice one of these, you're practicing the opposite.

I know it's the end of the day and there's...just to make it short and sweet, we had laws before 1492, we had ways of governing ourself. It was based on inclusion as opposed to exclusion. Everybody had a job to do. When I was a little kid, I was telling somebody at lunch, my...I was one of 13 children and I was smart. And so when my parents would get up at 5:00 in the morning, if I did all my work the day before, I got up with them at 5:00 and my dad would...I'd get to eat with my daddy, eggs and bacon and things like that. And he would tell my mother in Ojibwe what a wonderful child I was, what a wonderful child I was because I'd done all my work and I understood all of this that he was saying in Ojibwe, and it was my time to be with my parents. When I didn't do my job, I stayed in bed.

So we practiced these, we were taught these things, and in my work now at the Indigenous Peoples Task Force we have a youth theater program that's been in existence since 1990 and we have a cessation program for young people and when the kids come in every day, the first thing they do is they have tobacco ceremony. They say this is the favorite part of the program because they sit in a circle and they talk about who they are. And when they come in, they grab a little name badge like this and it has one of these words on it, one of these values and they put that on and in all the rest of the day there that is how they're going to respond to everything. And so we learn these values through practice and if we could begin to develop some of our programs on the reservations beginning in Head Start, pre-school, incorporating these values, we would be about being including people because the more people we have, the more power we have.

Right now, we're only one percent of the population or something like that and so we need to...we've lost so many people and so we need to become larger, to become stronger, and it's not just about those immediate resources. We need to think about how do we do this? We do this through...all of our children should know where did they come from, how did they come into the world. They should know their name. My name [Anishinaabe language], that means something to me. In my clan...next week I'm meeting with five young women who want to be put on their berry fast. These are the things that we're doing, teaching these young people these kinds of things.

The effects of colonization: none of us have, no matter what, I don't care if you're a lawyer, if you sit on the Supreme Court or if you're an elected tribal official, none of us have escaped the effects of colonization. We all have felt anxiety and depression, some of us more so than others and this is a picture that many of you have seen and it's actually Spaniards setting the dogs on people that they considered to be so different from them that they weren't quite human and these were...LGBT native population, we...many of us have self medicated, we've become addicted, and we've lost more than 50 percent of our gifts because we only come into the world with gifts and we have to get those back. And so how do we go through this process of de-colonization?

We're introducing these teachings into our community, hold community gatherings where we invite everybody, where...one of my cousins, she was on tribal, she was tribal chair for a couple of terms up at my reservation and one day she said to me, ‘Why is it that...you moved away from home when you were young and I stayed here and lived on the reservation all my life and why is it that you know so much more of the cultural teachings?' Well, partly it was because I sobered up when I was 21 years old. Between the time I was 14 and 21 I used up my quota of alcohol and drugs and the first thing I did was I learned how to meditate, and then gradually I found my way to the Midewin Lodge and began to learn some of these teachings.

Somebody else I was talking to a little while ago, Mr. Barber there, he said, ‘Some of those folks back in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, we were the old St. Paul families, the Indian families, and we clung together. We clung together because we were all that we had and nobody missed that Saturday night powwow at 475 Cedar St. where the Indian Center was.' And so we had those kind of community gatherings where people participated and we need to include everyone and we need to reorganize these kinds of community events in our...and I think we need to change our way of thinking. Instead of thinking about the glass being half full, we need to think about how do we fill up that glass so everybody gets a drink of that water? How do we build those kinds of homes? In our own community, my grandfather built many of the homes at Bois Forte and I tell you those houses were far better than those HUD homes that they came along in the ‘60s. But they did it together, my grandfather and my uncles -- they did that work together and that's what we need to do.

My mother was born in Canada, three generations ago. Her mother lived in Canada, my great-grandfather came from Leech Lake, but I'm full blood and I'm from Bois Forte, but you go back three generations and these boundaries that we have today did not exist 200 years ago. So why are we so intent on upholding these practices that tear us apart? In this room, you are the brightest people, you are the leaders, we've got to put our minds together and our hearts and come up with a new way of being, because this is the seventh generation and they said that if we are to ignite that light of the eighth fire that leads to peace and harmony, that we need to do it from a spiritual frame of view and to move forward that way.

So today, I will choose love and I hope that you do too because who are we if we are not...if we do not choose love. So it makes me really sad to think about some of the things that happen in our communities today -- some of the things that that we heard about this afternoon -- to many people, and if we're to survive and light that eighth fire, we need to move in that direction and if we're to not only survive as a people, but we have to make some different choices in terms of all humanity, all the people who currently live on Turtle Island, we need to bring them together. When they said, a new people will emerge in the time of the seventh fire, they meant we are all of that new people. We are all of those people and so it takes all the people on Turtle Island if we're going to survive as a species because certainly we know that the Creator has cleansed the earth before and there are many things that are going on today. We need to look at our resources and what are we doing to those.

On my reservation, I wrote an article about the water and they chose not to print it and they said because the mining companies might not like that. I said, 'But it's not about the mining companies, I'm not talking about the mining,' although we should be very careful about that because the sulfide mines that they're proposing are nothing like the mining that is taking place on the Iron Range near where I live. They said, ‘Well, but if we print it then the mining companies might want to have equal space.' And I said, ‘But you're the editor, you can choose.' So anyhow, they didn't and I went on and published it on a place called Alternate, which was then picked up in Canada and in many places and the article was about what I just said: today, I choose love. [Anishinaabe language]."