Ian Record:

“Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host, Ian Record. On today’s program we are honored to have with us Richard Luarkie. Since January 2011, Richard has served as Governor of his nation, the Pueblo of Laguna. He previously served as First Lieutenant Governor of Laguna and as a village officer for several terms and he is also a former small business owner. Governor, welcome and good to have you with us.

Richard Luarkie:

“Thank you.

Ian Record:

“You and I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and talk in the past on a number of nation building topics. I wanted to sit down with you today and have a conversation about another topic that we haven’t really touched base on yet and that is Native nation constitutionalism and constitutional reform and specifically the Pueblo of Laguna’s current constitution, how it came to be, and how it is changing. And I figured it would be beneficial if we start at the very beginning. What did the Pueblo of Laguna’s 'traditional,' unwritten constitution, if you will, look like before colonization and what core governance principles and institutions did it rely upon?

Richard Luarkie:

“Well, thank you for allowing me to be here again. For the Pueblo of Laguna, like many other tribes, our governance was based on traditional models, traditional teachings. Our creation story tells us that at the time of creation when our Mother created all entities -- deities, the world, the earth, the sun, the moon, the spiritual beings as well as the humans -- there was always leadership and there was always governance. And that governance, though, was fueled and inspired by values of love, of respect, of compassion, of responsibility, of obligation -- not necessarily rights, but responsibility and obligation to do our part. And so leadership was responsible for the caretaking of that and so that’s how I saw our governance systems run prior to any formal government system that came into play like constitutions. So like many other tribes the inspiration of tradition, the inspiration of spirituality, the inspiration of a way of being, in our language we say '[Pueblo language],' our way of life, is really how we governed ourselves. So that’s how we were structured as a government.

Ian Record:

“So in 1908 Laguna became one of the first Native nations to actually develop a written constitution and I’m curious, what prompted Laguna to take that step when it did and how did that written constitution compare to what you just laid out, basically the unwritten way of life that you relied upon for so long in terms of, during that time prior to colonization when that was the sole guide for how the Laguna people lived. How did, what prompted the Laguna to develop that constitution and how did it compare and contrast to that traditional way of life?

Richard Luarkie:

“Well, when the 1908 constitution came along, it was probably a result of a culmination of events, of issues. Laguna like any other tribe had its issues. During the 1800s, there was a lot of divisiveness going on, there was a lot of infiltration from different factions, there was the attempt to hold onto our traditional way of life, our traditional governance systems, but you had Protestant and Presbyterian and Catholic and still some influence from maybe even the Mexican influence and of course the federal government. So you had all this dynamic going on. But you also have now, the inclusion of Bureau [of Indian Affairs] schools, the Carlisle Indian School, the Albuquerque Indian School and all the other schools across the country that took our young kids away when they were small in the 1800s and now come the late 1800s, early 1900s these kids are home and they’re now adults and they’ve been groomed in a manner of how is it that we should govern ourselves. So they’ve learned a whole new system so they began to utilize those teachings. What was also maybe, I don’t think it’s unique to Laguna because I know other tribes and in particular other pueblos this has happened to, but we had three Anglo governors during the end of the 1800s that were married into the tribe. They were Presbyterian and that became a strong influence during that time period and that’s what helped to architect that first constitution.

Understandably though, our local community saw that as looking at it maybe constructively...also recognized that the federal government through the recognition by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 when he recognized the 19 Pueblos by granting us a cane recognizing our sovereign authority. They recognized that acknowledgment. And so as a way to maybe better communicate with the federal government, they saw this as a tool. So it was then adopted by our council and when you read through the 1908 constitution, there’s still remnants of the time before where you had a leader and that leader was, it literally says in the 1908 constitution, ‘The governor is the supreme ruler,’ because prior to that the religious orders are what they call our caciques at the time, they were the ones that appointed the leadership and the leadership then had full authority. But when the constitution came in that changed and so, to a certain degree, and so you began to see remnants still sticking there within the constitution, but I really believe that it was for the purpose of trying to find compromise, trying to find a way to hold on to our traditional way of being, but also prepare for how is the future moving and how do we communicate with those other forms of government in the future.

Ian Record:

“So in part it was to enable outsiders such as the federal government to make sense of who Laguna was and what they wanted to preserve perhaps?

Richard Luarkie:

“I believe it was a way to make sense of who Laguna was, but also I think very, I think intelligently a way for Laguna to protect what it had and using the government’s tools to do that.

Ian Record:

“So that was in 1908 and we’re sitting here in 2014. So you have now 106 years as a Pueblo with a written constitution and I’m curious, how has that 1908 constitution evolved over the past now century plus?

Richard Luarkie:

“It’s real interesting because you begin to see, we’ve had four constitutional amendments since 1908. So you begin to see a shift from authority of one person to the authority being given to the council. You also begin to see a watering down, if you will, of maybe the practice of core values to more formality in how governance is done. And so what I mean by that is the 1908 constitution was in place for almost 50 years.

The first amendment took place in 1949 and so in 1949 that amendment took place for two pieces. The first one was to adopt the IRA because we now became an Indian Reorganization Act tribe. We adopted that. Even though it was not required, the government, the leadership at the time of the Pueblo felt that this was a way to enhance our ability to continue to work with the government. So we became an IRA tribe. They adopted that. They also adopted the membership process. So as a part of the 1940 census they wrote that in. So we began to see membership. But at that time membership was based on residency, it wasn’t based on blood quantum or anything like that. It was based on residency and it also demonstrated core values because if you were helping, you were taking care of your family, you were being part of the community, even if you were not from there, you applied for membership, you were considered for that membership and in many times given membership. So we have individuals that were from another tribe married in at Laguna applied for membership during that timeframe and on paper are four fourths Laguna. So those are things that happened during that time period.

Then we saw a short nine years later we saw the constitution amendment take place again in 1958 and we saw that core value practice begin to shrink and the driver in the 1959 constitution was revenue because now we went from having almost no revenue to having millions and the reason that happened was because of the discovery of uranium on our reservation. So in a short nine years the constitution had a major change. So we implemented blood quantum at that time period. So we went from a value of being a part of the community to defining who’s going be a member based on blood driven by dollars.

And so the other piece that also came in that was very critical during that time period was our tribal court system. So our tribal court system was adopted in the 1958 constitution. So we went from again that membership of being half Indian to half Laguna, tribal courts and per capita. So now we have those three things now being implemented into the constitution. And we began to see that the governor from the 1908 to the 1949 to the 1958 constitution, we’re beginning to see a shift of authority being given to, from the 1908 to the 1949 to the staff officers, away from the governor and in the 1959 constitution, ’58 constitution we begin to see more authority be given to the council, so from the governor to the staff now to the council.

And so now jumping to 1984 we saw another amendment. And so in 1984, the amendment that took place that was most significant there was again related to blood quantum and we reduced the blood quantum requirement from one half to one fourth and the driver for that is we were seeing more, we were seeing a declination in people being enrolled because nobody was meeting that blood quantum anymore. So that was a driver. The other piece of it was that it was an effort to make parents or grandparents, guardians, whoever more responsible for getting their children enrolled. So what also went into that constitutional amendment was that from the time a child is born, the parent, guardian, grandparent, whoever, they have two years to enroll their child. If they miss that two years, they’re out of luck. They can’t become a member, even if they’re four fourths. So that happened in 1984.

So in 2012, we did another constitutional amendment and the constitutional amendment was for two specific things: to remove secretarial approval and to remove the two-year restriction. So the secretarial approval one was pretty straightforward and so that we began to move down that path of being responsible for our own way of governing. The removal of the two-year restriction was an effort to try to get back to that core value because we constantly remind and we tell our people, ‘Love one another, respect one another, be good to one another, be inclusive,’ but if you’re not one fourth, you can’t be a part of us. That’s not consistent with that teaching so we, and if you miss that two-year timeframe, you’re out of luck. And so we removed that so that we can begin the process in that, and so the two-year restriction was removed. And the reason we shared with people is that it makes sense, there’s nothing wrong with people being made responsible to get their children enrolled, but what about those children that didn’t have a chance, that got adopted out. They never had a chance because they didn’t have a parent, they didn’t have a grandparent, they didn’t have anybody and it’s not fair to them.

So what about those people that traditionally, there in our part of the country when a male marries a female, he goes with her family land if she’s not from our Pueblo, obviously he leaves our Pueblo and back in the ‘40s, ‘50s, prior to that, they actually relinquished their rights and went with that other tribe. So if they did the right thing, life happens, maybe the spouse passes on, then this person, because of that two-year restriction is now out of luck, but this now gives them the opportunity to come back to the Pueblo. So those were the drivers behind those amendments and so we’re now beginning dialogue as a directive by the tribal council to now go to that next step of looking at blood quantum and so we’re preparing for that discussion this year with our community, which will probably, if they want to change that, lead to another constitutional amendment.

Ian Record:

“I was going to ask about these 2012 amendments. You and I have had this conversation in the past, but I think it would be helpful to go into a little more detail, because I remember you saying that one of the reasons why you guys tackled that first was to remove the consideration of the feds, of an external actor, if you will, from the deliberations about how do we want to constitute ourselves moving forward? What do we want our constitution to look like where we can basically base it solely on what’s in our best interest and not so much what will the feds approve or not approve of? Can you talk a little bit more about the mindset behind saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to deal with that first. We’re going to get that out of the way and then we can sort of focus on these huge constitutional challenges we face like blood quantum?

Richard Luarkie:

“Right. For our Pueblo we’ve done a lot of, taken a lot of time to look back at history and the implications of policy, federal, all the way back to the Spanish period and the church, the Catholic Church, the Protestants, all those implications, what’s happened. We’ve had also the great fortune to hear individuals like Mr. Jim Anaya and individuals talk about those areas of Indigenous rights and the areas of non-recognition to recognition to now the responsibility of that recognition.

So for Laguna, it was really embracing the ideology of the responsibility for that recognition and in order for us to be responsible, we have to make our decisions in the manner that best fits us, not only on paper and in constitutions, but here and here. It has to make sense to us. And when you have an external body saying, ‘Well, that doesn’t conform with this code or this whatever,’ that’s inconsistent. And so it was a significant driver for us to be able to remove that so that we can then move forward and make these much larger decisions because even things as simple as ‘Indian.’ When you look at the 25 CFR [Code of Federal Regulations] they have ‘Indian’ defined this way. When you look at ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act], it’s defined this way. When you look at housing, it’s defined this way. So we’re defined for convenience. We needed to take that out of the way and we need to define who we are. And so those were our drivers.

Ian Record:

“It’s interesting, Laguna’s not the only one that’s taken that approach. There’s a growing number of other nations that have basically come to that same realization that, ‘if we are serious about taking full ownership in our governance again and understanding the often insidious forces that were at play, external forces that led us to have the system we have now that is not perhaps true to who we are, we’ve got to get that other actor out of the equation, that Secretary of Interior out of the equation.’ But you still had to go through a secretarial election, right, to get that out and I’m curious. We’re spending part of the conference this afternoon talking about that very topic of secretarial elections and removing the Secretary of Interior approval clause and you guys just recently went through the secretarial election and that’s often a very scary proposition for tribes is to think, ‘Oh, not only do we have to reform our constitution internally, but then we’ve got to go through this bureaucratic sort of often drawn-out process at the federal end and I was wondering if you can perhaps paint a brief picture of what it was like for Laguna, what some of the challenges were in that secretarial election process, perhaps any advice you could give other nations for navigating that process effectively so they can actually get through that election process and then perhaps return to the more important matter at hand.

Richard Luarkie:

“Well, for Laguna, one of the things that was beneficial for us is the relationship we had with the Bureau in our area and them understanding the whys -- why we want to do this -- and the whole purpose behind it and educating them on that. Once we had that piece, and it wasn’t a challenge for us. We’re fortunate we’ve had a good relationship so that wasn’t a big challenge. What was interesting to me and where the challenge fell was with our elders and the older population because their pushback was, ‘Well, if we remove secretarial approval, then we’re relieving the federal government of their trust responsibility,’ and we’re saying, ‘No. No, that’s not right.’ And so what it caused us to do was go through this whole process of educating and reeducating our community and reeducating and so it took us, we started this, gosh, [in] 2005. So it didn’t happen just overnight, but it took some iteration and most important, the most important ingredient was the education. So we still have, to this day we still have some elders saying, ‘That was not right because you relieved the federal government of their trust responsibility.’ You have the other end of the spectrum, our younger people jumping for joy saying, ‘It’s about time. Why are we letting the government do this to us?’ So it’s a growing pain and I think we need to even after the process has taken place, we need to continually educate of what does this policy mean and what are the implications and what does it mean to be a sovereign tribe, a sovereign nation.

Ian Record:

“So I’m glad you touched on citizen education because I wanted to ask you some more questions about that. You mentioned that just around this issue of these two amendments that you passed in 2012, that there was a several-year education process that went into place and I would imagine that that as you said continues on with some of the conversations you want to continue to have around the constitution, whether it’s blood quantum or something else. What approaches have you taken to that task of citizen education, of citizen engagement? What’s worked, what hasn’t? I would assume you’ve learned quite a bit from the citizen interaction you’ve had around this topic over the last several years and that you plan to apply to continuing the conversation with them now.

Richard Luarkie:

“One of the things that has been helpful is consistency and what I mean by that is we’ve, in particular to our constitutional review and amendments, we’ve established a Constitution Review Committee. Since our last amendment we’ve disbanded it, but over those years, once the council decided and the community decided that we need to do a constitutional change, that committee’s been consistent so from administration to administration, whether I’ve been the governor or not, we’ve not changed that committee. So the consistency has been there.

The other pieces that we started the conversation with the community, asking them, ‘What do you think needs to change? Here are the things we’re suggesting and here’s why.’ And so having their input was critical. The other piece is educating the council because if the council doesn’t understand and they’re being asked and it contradicts what you’re telling people, it creates a whole fireworks of assumptions and, ‘Well, he said, she said,’ kind of things and so making sure the council understands what’s happening.

And so I think those are really important things and making sure that there was clarity. And obviously with a larger community it’s more difficult to manage that communication, but I think those pockets are real important. And in our community, we have six villages so in our council meetings...every Thursday we have village meetings so that’s communicated to the villages so the villages have the opportunity to ask questions and pose comments or what not to get back to the council for consideration. And so those are the communication streams that we used. And so the point I’m trying to make is that communication was probably the key element in this constitutional amendment.

Ian Record:

“So you mentioned earlier that revisiting the blood quantum as a prime criteria for determining who can be a part of us and who can’t is something that you’re revisiting. Are there other areas of the constitution or other things that people are talking about integrating into the constitution? I guess I’m trying to get a better handle on what sort of constitutional issues will Laguna be tackling in the near future?

Richard Luarkie:

“That’s probably going to be the biggest one right now. The other piece of it, our offices,  we have a tribal secretary and we have a tribal interpreter and we have a tribal treasurer that are elected officials, but in the constitution it says that they have no governing authority. They’re basically elected administrators. So the question in the community has been, ‘Do we need to elect those positions or just hire full-time with people that have the background to fulfill those particular roles?’ What it’s going to cause is really the requirement to go do a whole job description and those kinds of things because right now in the constitution their job description is as an example tribal secretary, keep the meeting minutes, that kind of stuff and that’s it. So those kind of minor things I think we’ll see addressed in the future, but I think right now the focus really is going to be on this larger element of blood quantum and how do we maintain our tribe, how do we maintain identity as well as protecting our sovereignty going forward. And it’s a, I think it’s going to be a much larger conversation than just blood quantum because when I think about sovereignty, in my mind sovereignty isn’t a definition, of course they’re out there in a dictionary or whatever, but to me sovereignty starts here. Sovereignty is a community thing and I think that is going to be part of what’s going to be woven into this whole conversation of moving forward on blood quantum because it’s going to touch a lot of other areas.

Ian Record:

"Governor, we really appreciate you taking some time to sit down and share your thoughts and experience and wisdom with us."

Richard Luarkie:

"Yes. sir. You're welcome."