Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I'm your host Ian Record. On today's program, I am honored to welcome Frank Ettawageshik. Frank is a citizen and the former chairman of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. He currently serves as the Executive Director for the United Tribes of Michigan, and recently was chosen by the Native Nations Institute to serve as its 2010 Indigenous Leadership Fellow. Frank, welcome to the program."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Hi."

Ian Record:

"I'd like to start off by asking you a question I ask virtually everyone I sit down with, and that is: what is Native nation building and what does it entail for your nation?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, it has a lot of different parts to it. Some people think it's the constitution, some people think it's economic development. And those are components of it, clearly, and are very important, and maybe some of the more visible parts, but nation building to me is the, building the capacity of the citizenry of your nation to deal with change and to deal with the issues that come before it, and to do that in a healthy way. To me, you're building...a nation is wealthy, and it has true wealth as opposed to money. And, you know, economic development can bring you a lot of money, but it doesn't necessarily bring you true wealth. And the...you need wisdom to figure out how to take money from economic development, how to use a document that you've created if a constitution, how to actually have the institutions of your society, not just governmental institutions, but you know, institutions of your tribal society, of your nation, have them become strong. And that, to me that's what nation building is."

Ian Record:

"Dr. Stephen Cornell with the Native Nations Institute has framed nation building as in part the challenge of remaking a nation's governance tools. Do you agree with that statement, and why?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, I think it's important, but you have to...the tribal government is not the tribe. The government serves the tribe. And to the extent that you have...you need proper institutions. And those institutions may be governmental institutions, but they may be institutions of your society. And you need to have them be strong in order to truly do the nation building. So it, you know the implication of the question would be if you do constitutional reform, you got, you're all done. And...but to me, I think that it's a little deeper than that. And so clearly, an inadequate governing document can be a huge hindrance towards the development of good, of proper governance. I mean it can be a real problem, and needs, you do need to have a good constitution for your government. Now that constitution, in some cases it may not be written, and you know, but nevertheless, you need to have a system of governance that's in place that the society understands and that your tribal citizenry understands and is able to use and that they feel comfortable with. Otherwise you, you can impose a system that, that for instance is not, that may be a good idea somewhere, but may not be a good idea in your community. You can't do that. You have to have something that works."

Ian Record:

"Follow-up question to that: you've obviously been central in the nation building efforts of your own nation and have gained deep insights into what a number of other Native nations have been doing over the past 20, 30 years during the course of your career working in a number of different arenas -- how do you see this question of why some Native nations have proven more successful than others in achieving, not just their economic development goals, but their community development goals? These social institution-building efforts, if you will?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Part of that is a question of leadership. You need to have the, you need to have the right combination of people together. Some, there's what, the 'Great Man theory': Does history make the great man, or does the great man make history? And I've always been a proponent of the belief that history makes the great man, or the great person, or the great leader in this case as it may be. And that it's not, it's less the force of a single personality, and it's more the outgrowth of the culture. And that when people are at the point that they're ready to do certain things, those people who can accomplish those will become apparent within their communities. And our peoples have suffered immensely. For over 500 years, our wealth has been gradually transmitted away from us, our wealth, not just monetary wealth, but the wealth of our resources, the access to our resources. Even if they're there, we sometimes, the game warden stops us from hunting so that we, for the food that we always hunted. And we have, that this loss, gradually, over the years, has been very difficult for us. We've maintained our elements of culture and items through that. But our, many of our institutions within our tribal societies have suffered at that over the years because of a lot of, just the loss of many people, say through the small pox epidemics and the measles and all the other things. We lost a huge amount of institutional knowledge within our tribal societies. And that that...that made it more difficult for us to grow –- we were in survival mode and we had to try to figure out how to pull things together to survive.

So, different communities and different tribal communities, different tribal nations are at different points in their recovery, because we are recovering. This is the first generation, or maybe the second, in our history that actually has more rather than less in most cases. In fact, in my life I've seen our tribal nation go, really this is the first generation that has had more rather than less when it comes to access to resources. When it comes to this, the community support for strengthening cultural society, strengthening cultural teaching, that we actually have more rather than less now. And that's an unusual situation for us. So in the cases of, in the case of money, we have, there's money from a casino, we have to figure out how to deal with that. How do we deal with money, how do we deal with the problems that come from a market place that moves up and down and back and forth? And how do we deal with that? Whereas before we were always on the low end of everything, we were broke. And so if the market fluctuated, we already were at the bottom, and you know, it didn't really take us much further down. But today, we actually have made advances, and so we can suffer through changes in the national economy for instance. So these are things that are, that you know that I think about that in trying to understand and learn as we look towards the future."

Ian Record:

"Dr. Cornell also...in a related question, Dr. Cornell refers to governing systems as fundamentally tools for creating the future that Native Nations want -- essentially a vehicle for strategic planning and implementation. Is that something you agree with, is that something that you've envisioned your government doing as part of its role, fundamental role?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, the government clearly has a role for these things. You know, we have a planning department, for instance. And the planning department was really the first independent department that we created that was, that became out of the, when we started doing a modern administrative government as opposed to our traditional government. This was a, and it was important because there's financial planning and we had to learn how to do budget projections and running grants and all the other things. We also had, we had to deal with phone systems and how do you, how do you get it, deal with an expanding phone system from one to two to three to five to twenty-five to fifty to one hundred. You know, how do you deal with all of those systems. So we've had to learn to do all of that as we've had expanded offices, and as we've had expanded resources to run those offices. You know, we had an archives and records department that we had to create within the government because it was no longer possible to store our records in boxes under people's beds and in the hall closet in people's homes. We now started having fairly large collections of data that needed to be stored and taken care of. And then you have financial record keeping data that has to be stored for a long time. So we, these are kind of things we had to, you know, to figure. So yes, to those extent, we do have to, you know, you do have to have these institutions. But at the same time we have to be careful to not expect that our tribal governments do everything for people. That, that there's a, as I said the government serves the tribe, but the government isn't the tribe. And that's a very difficult thing because they, literally, the tribal citizens often actually ask us to do things that, it would probably be better if we didn't. And you know, there's a number of different things that I, that I think about in that regard that are, that I think sort of... One of them I guess I'll talk about is buying the meat for the feast, for instance.

Once we started having some money, people felt that we needed to provide the money to buy the meat for the traditional feast that we were having. And I felt that we'd had these forever, and that we should try to continue to have them in that same way. The government didn't necessarily need to be involved in that to make those things work. But we started providing the funds. And this gradually turned into providing the money to actually cater the entire feast. And we ended up having this where instead of having the women come and help cook and do a lot of the work, we had, you know, the casinos they have from...the catering folks came in and they just took care of everything. And we'd had this, and we were in a northern climate, and then we had a snow day, and very, we ended up having ten people come to this feast and a lot of people got really upset thinking, 'Well, nobody wants their traditions anymore. Nobody wants to attend the feast, nobody wants to do this and...' So it almost died because government, and for me it died I felt because government had gotten involved and started to, you know, question the date that it was held, and start to wonder who could come, and who might not, and started providing the money for this whole thing, as opposed to doing it the way that we had always done it.

So the next year when it came time to do the feast, we -- in a very long meeting at our elders lunch with the, we had just the week before the feast -- we discussed whether we, the people were right that nobody wanted to come to the feast and that we should just do away with it, or what should we do. Well then this long discussion got turned back into a potluck and got turned into everybody was coming and we had the biggest group that had been at this feast in 25 years. And that continues to this day being run that way, where we, everybody pitches in and works together on it. And it's the way it should have been. Well, that's to me a shining example of what government shouldn't do, and then what government should do. They should stay out of it. Government, in this case, got the grants, provided the funds, and built the facility in which we hold the feast. So it's a government hall that the community can use, and then the community comes in and uses it. And not only uses it for this event, but uses it for all types of other events: birthday parties, and for funerals, for state dinners, for all different kinds of things that are used in this facility. But most of the things that happen there are not government functions. Most of things are functions of the community as a whole."

Ian Record:

"So essentially what you're saying is that it's government's role to empower community and not necessarily replace community."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yeah. I think that's a good summation of it. And to me this is, we have to really be careful of this. When we look at what we're asked to do as a government, and also what we choose to do. And those things are, and they have to be thought through, you know. This long-term thinking about the implications of what we do have to be thought through."

Ian Record:

"Isn't part of that just the struggle with managing growth? What you're seeing, particularly with the advent of gaming, so many tribes, the amount of resources that they're receiving and then having to figure out what do we do with this? It just grows, has grown astronomically over the past 15-20 years, and it's kind of, it's been a challenge for some tribes to kinda take a step back and consider these very issues that you're talking about."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, the communities have a lot issues. But there are people who are quite critical of how tribes do some of these things and look at them. But I actually think that, you know, we need to look at it like this: we really figured out well how to be poor. We got that figured out really good. We know how to take a chicken and feed 30 people with it, you know. We can, we can figure out things. We got being poor figured out. But when we have money, we have to figure out how to do that. Lots of people with lots of money have a real hard time. Lot of old money families have all kinds of different issues. They're different issues than the ones of not having money. Well, as tribal citizens, tribal communities, having money is something that we have to figure out how to work with, and it's going to take a generation or two or three of four to try to work through those issues. How do we deal with not being the poorest ones on the block? How do we deal with, with not, with actually having resources that we need to allocate as opposed to just barely surviving? And those are different kinds of, different kinds of roles. So it's a natural, it's a natural issue. People who win lotteries --there's been studies done about the people who win lotteries. And most of them, after, oh say ten years, are probably worse off than they were before they won. Every now and then there's an exception, but because they don't know how to deal with the issues of having, of having money, and having access to resources. I look at it -- once again it's like I said earlier -- it's like having money versus having, taking that money and turning it into true wealth. And that's were you need to have, you need to put a lot of you effort into training people how to deal with that."

Ian Record:

"So let's talk a little bit more about that. How would you define true wealth?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"A safe, peaceful community. Where you have, you know, you have adequate education, you've got healthy people, you have adequate resources. And you can perpetuate and grow your culture. Not just talk about the way things used to be, but actually adapt and grow to the changing times and have your culture be alive, not just static, something that's in a book or something that's been studied and that...you know, so it's...to me true wealth is this. And true wealth sometimes involves having money, resources, and doing things with them. But true wealth can also be merely just good schools and safe homes and jobs. But that's, that's being wealthy, being, having a strong sense of self-worth, a good strong sense of place, not just in, in the physical place, but a place in culture, a place in history, a place in the preservation and continuation of culture and your environment."

Ian Record:

"I'd like to switch gears and turn to a topic that you're well versed in, and that is constitutions. Back in 2005, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians adopted a new constitution, and I was curious to learn more about what necessitated your nation to undertake that major step, and I guess give us an overview of what that involved."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, in our case, we were not on the list of federally acknowledged tribes. We felt we always had been acknowledged, but we felt that the government had somehow forgotten that; that they had neglected to keep us on the list. And so we spent 120 years in a legal battle with the United States government over this issue. And when Richard Smith went down with his ship in a storm in Saginaw Bay in 1871 in Lake Huron, he took with him the institutional memory as being the scribe at the treaty negotiations, the Treaty of 1855, Treaty of Detroit of 1855 that covered a substantial portion of the lower peninsula of Michigan, and a substantial piece of the upper peninsula of Michigan as well, in which today there are five federally recognized tribes, and a couple of others that are working toward federal recognition. And we had to fight with the U.S. Congress, with the executive branch, within the courts for all of that time. We had people who were involved in lawsuits, people traveling to Washington, all laying the groundwork for eventually us being successful in the passage of Public Law 103-324, the Reaffirmation Act for Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians and the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, both in Michigan. And this bill was signed on September 21, 1994.

There had been numerous legislative attempts over the years on things that would have affirmed our status in one way or another. There were a number of different things that happened, and there's a huge long history just behind that treaty, and behind the ramifications of it. But we spent this time working for this bill, which reaffirmed our status -- it didn't grant recognition to us, and it didn't restore recognition to us. It reaffirmed that we'd always had it, which I think is an extremely important, subtle difference. And in that bill it made sure that we be on the list of federally recognized tribes, so we'd be added to that, to the List Act, you know. And then we also were...it called for the development of a tribal role, and there was a certain timetable for that. It called for the development of a tribal constitution that, the one we subsequently developed. But it also recognized as an interim document, the constitution that we were operating under at that time that was our interim constitution, and then we were going to, we had to move forward with a new constitution.

Fortunately for us in this process, we had seen, we could learn from the issues of many neighboring tribes, and other tribes across the country, in the documents they'd had. We had very early on -- when we were trying to figure out how to work on our issues -- we had a grant from the Administration for Native Americans, and in that grant we wanted, we were gonna put on a conference, you know, a meeting for the tribe to discuss constitutions, to discuss the issues of federal acknowledgement. And we -- our attorney and I -- we were talking on the phone, and we wanted the Vine Deloria book, The Nations Within, we were discussing that book and we said, 'Well we need somebody that can really talk about that book, and talk about the issues in it. That's really what we need in the community to help move us along.' And finally one of the other of us, and I don't, never have remembered which one of us said, 'Well, why don't we just invite Vine?' And so we subsequently did invite Vine who came to our, came to the community and he -- along with a number of other people -- through the day gave discussion about constitutions and issues and laid the groundwork for helping us understand the issue of constitutions, and really what was wrong with a lot of the, what's called the boilerplate IRA constitutions that are out there, which, by the way, was pretty much what we were operating under is our interim constitution, was patterned after one of the boilerplate IRA constitutions; all of the powers in the council, and the council creates the court by passing a law, the executive and the legislative are all embodied within one institution, the tribal council. And as long as you have good people in a system like that, it works. But there are no checks and balances really. If the, if somebody, if a tribal member sues the government for something and wins in tribal court, the council can abolish the law that created the court, fire the judge, and then pass a new one and get a new judge and just keep doing that over and over until they get one that finally rules their way. That could happen, and actually things like that have occurred various places around Indian Country -– judges have been fired. So you really need a robust dispute resolution process, or a strong independent tribal court. One, and that's an important part of this. Well we discussed these things with, when Vine was there, and helped us start the process of thinking about this. And at the same time, this was prior to the passage of our reaffirmation act, Vine agreed to testify and came and gave the lead testimony for, at our hearing for, what became Public Law 103-324, when we went to the U.S. House for our first hearing on the bill.

So we had, we created a constitution committee, we worked through the grant, we prepared a draft, an initial draft that was looking at our, sort of looking at us from a theoretical point of view. This is what we'd like to see, as opposed to this is what we actually are. And then we had a committee that worked for number of years putting a draft together. Our constitutional process involved -- the development of the constitution involved -- having a committee that worked on drafts, studying constitutions from other tribes all over the country –- the good ones, the bad ones, the long ones, the short ones, the...and trying to learn from the experience of other people, as well as try to find something that fit our makeup, and our community. So we then did a public hearing, a meeting in all, not just in Northern Michigan right where our people are, but we also have a lot of people who live in the cities who would move there for jobs down in the southern part of the state. So we had meetings not only there, but also in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had a total of eight meetings where the, sometimes we had as few as five people show up, sometimes as many as sixty would show up to these meetings where...and we wrote a transcript of the meetings, and talked about things like: if you're gonna be a judge, can you ever, can you have a felony in your record? Is there a length of time that you could go where we could consider that you might be rehabilitated? OK, if you've lived in the community, if you had a felony when you're 18, and you serve your time, and you're out and then 25 years later when you're, you know, in your 60's and you're being considered after living an exemplary life, would you be eligible to be a judge? Would you be eligible to be on the council, or to be the chairman, or...and we discussed these things with the community, and came up with, for most instances that they would be, there's the ability to be forgiven, and, not in every instance, but in most. And then we talked about what age people would have to be and what the basic criteria would be. We talked about all these things throughout the community in these discussions. And then a draft was prepared. That draft was then sent to all of the membership, one to every member. And then we then asked for written comments. We also had a meeting where you could come and give your, you could bring your written comments, you could mail them in, you could come to the meeting, and you could talk and discuss the things, ask questions, and we had it in an auditorium and had a fairly large turnout for this meeting. Then we took those, the committee took all those comments, and all those thoughts and everything, and took them back and made changes and thought it through and came up with a new draft, which we mailed out to everybody, and then did this whole process again. And we mailed, I think three times, the draft out for comments and had meetings where we put everything together. This took years; this was not something that was a matter of months. This took years to do this. And we finally ended up with a draft that was ready to be submitted to the, that was ready to be submitted to the Department of Interior.

Now the bill that we had, the Public Law 103-324, the Reaffirmation Act, it...when it called for an election for a constitution, it called for a secretarial election. So the fact that there's a secretarial election is really the only tie to this constitution as an IRA constitution, 'cause they required approval. So this was an IRA constitution only to the extent that it was required that that secretarial election. Because it really was not...this constitution that was developed was a separation of powers constitution, far from those boilerplate IRA constitutions. And it has a checks and balances within the different departments, within the different branches of government. And in addition to those checks and balances, there's also an independent prosecutor's office that, to help ensure this. And then there's also, not a branch of government, but a constitutional entity, the election board is also an independent body. And so these were the kinds of checks and balances that we built into this document.

Eventually we -- after considerable negotiation with the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] -- of course we, when we submitted it it was for an informal review. So we get this informal review and it took a long time. They're supposed to, there's timetables built into this stuff, but nobody ever meets those, the feds don't and, you know, the tribe, we didn't either, and so it took a long time to get this process. But eventually we got through that and negotiated through their informal review and then we got a formal document. Then we sent it in for the formal review and then we had to argue about certain points in the constitution about membership and territory and things that we had to sort of go through and deal with. And eventually we got the Assistant Secretary of the Interior to sign off saying that we were ready for a secretarial election – this was in the fall of 2004. And so the Bureau then started out to do the secretarial election, creating an election board that was our election board plus a couple members from the bureau. And they did a registration for that and then from the registered voters who registered for that election, it was about a three-quarters vote in favor of the constitution, which was...the election was certified on February 1, 2005. One of the key points to this, so that was a process of getting that constitution. It was a very long involved process, involving the community..."

Ian Record:

"A very organic process from what you're describing."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"...Yes. The next thing though, there's another important part of this constitution that I think was critical to its success, and I don't want to leave this out in terms of this point, but we...when people do constitutional reform, often the new constitution just goes into effect on that, on a particular day. Well, we were going from the old, pretty much a boilerplate, IRA-type tribal council, all authority being there, to one of different branches of government. And the people elected under an old constitution couldn't serve under this new one adequately, you know, it'd be really confusing. So when we adopted the new constitution, one of the provisions in it, was that it would not go into effect until the people were elected and sworn in to serve who would be implementing the new constitution. So it was September 21th, I mean, it took from February, it took months to have the election, to go through the process, and have people sworn in who then took office, and the new constitution went into effect. And that was a really important thing.

The other thing we did that helped with the transition that I think is...would be helpful to people is that we hired a couple of consultants to come in who had studied constitutions and had worked with tribes. We brought them, we gave them our document, and they had not been part of the drafting of the document, but we gave them our document and we said, 'We don't want to know what's wrong with this. Don't give us a detailed analysis of what's wrong with this. What we want you to do is to help us understand how to implement it. What are the things that we're gonna have to know when it comes to implementing this?' And then we hired them to come and work with the council, the newly elected council. And the day before we were all sworn in, they came in and did this training with the tribal council and with the executive offices, with all of the judges who would be carrying over, the process and...to go through this...and key members of commissions and key staff. So we had a training session on what the constitution meant. What it meant to be on a separation of powers, who was supposed to do what, how you appropriated money for instance, you do, you appropriated money through a process where you authorized the expenditure, then you appropriated the money and then you had to approve the, a budget modification where you put the money. And so those were things that we learned for instance from this, is way to keep adequate track of finances and dealing with that. And, so we went through this and we actually had a fairly smooth transition and went into this process.

So we went six months without...I attended every meeting as the, I was the chief executive elected under that first constitution. I attended every meeting for six months, all of the council meetings. They started to get a little restive about that because I'm a chief executive and I'm not really part of the council, so well, maybe they didn't really want me there. But they really wanted the chief financial officer, the CFO, and they really wanted the tribal attorney. But both of them worked for the executive now, and they, I told them, 'You can't have the CFO and the tribal attorney if you don't have me.' And they really didn't want me, so then they finally agreed, 'Okay, well then we won't have any of the people there, you know, you'll come in periodically.' And so we did, we had a table in the back where we'd come in and visit the meetings and answer questions when they had them and give them information, but we didn't attend every meeting. Well as soon as I wasn't attending every meeting, they started taking actions that didn't have input from the executive, and therefore within three weeks we had our first veto. So you know, things got interesting and we sort of worked that through where the executive exercises his prerogative with veto or with signing a bill, or letting it happen without signature. Those are all provisions of the constitution we put in.

So this is stuff that we did in the transition. And I mention one other thing about constitutions in here I think is important, and that is that a lot of people said, 'Well gee, you know, the separation of powers looks a lot like the U.S. constitution, why are we copying them? You know, we don't need to just copy them, you know we need to do our own thing, you know.' And, you know, I think of a story and I, about a project, a gift that my son gave me that he, he provided this, he went to camp, you know I think he was eight, and he made this thing, and I got it and it, it was wood burned on it, you know, and it said 'To the second greatest dad in the world.' And I went, 'Well gee, what is this? You know?' And he looked at it and he said, 'Well, but dad, you know, this other guy he said, ‘To the best dad in the world' and I couldn't copy him.' So I get a real kick out of that one. But the point is, is that, you know, we need to be careful. If something's good, just because somebody else uses it doesn't mean we shouldn't use it, particularly when they copied us when they prepared these checks and balances within the constitution of the United States. And they were, they took advice from tribes and they, they lived here on this continent and many ideas in there are native to this continent, they grew out of it. Even to the rules, the decorum in Congress and the way things are done. Many of those things came from the observation of tribal councils, of council meetings and different things. And so, you know, we've made a major contribution to the way the U.S. government functions. And if there's something that works, we shouldn't be, shouldn't say, 'Oh well, we can't do it cause they're doing it.' We need to say, 'Does it work and does it fit us?' And if it does, then we, we should be, not feel bad at all about taking that to use and using it to our own benefit."

Ian Record:

"Well yeah, it gets to the point of it, just because they copied us doesn't mean they own it."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yes."

Ian Record:

"You know, they're the only one that can use it."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yes. And that's...and so those are important things that we need to, that we need to think about when it comes to this. And so the constitution that we developed, that we put in place, I served four years as the first chief executive under that. I left office last August now -- in 2009 -- and it was, you know we're in, so now we're into a new administration and was, as with anything there's gonna be pushes and pulls. There's constantly, there's a, always a tension. With checks and balances, part of what that is is a certain tension between the different departments. And that's really sort of designed that way. And if there's a little bit of tension it's not a bad thing. But you, you know the executive authority for instance, the council, is really nervous about not exerting executive authority often, and really a lot of what they'd like to do is executive, and like the U.S. Congress tries to assert legislative authority, I mean executive authority and there's constant pull between the executive and the legislative, and that same thing is true within this kind of a document. You're gonna have that, and you're gonna have a court that will have to decide if one thing, if you've gone too far or not. But it's really important and what's...

The other thing that's important about a separation of powers constitution for me is that it's cumbersome, it's slower. And because it's slower it gives time for people to watch what's happening, to think about it, and the tribal citizenry can get involved. And if they don't like it they can let you know. You want something that takes, something has to be posted for 30 days before you can act on it for instance. You need things like that in there to give people time. Even if very few of them actually take the time, they need to know that they can, and they need to -- for those people that are interested -- they need to have that opportunity to do that in order to feel comfortable that the government actually is doing what they like and is a reflection of the community. When things can happen overnight without any notice at all, it's bad. And the other thing is you have to be able to notify people what's happened. People need to understand what the law is. A council can sit around passing laws all the time, but if you've got several thousand members, and they can't all attend the meetings, and if they have no way of knowing what the law is, you can't very well pass a law and then go out and arrest somebody for not following the law, unless they've had an opportunity to be involved in that, to understand what it is, unless they truly consent to that.

So if a law gets passed that they don't like, you need a mechanism within that constitution for them to remove it, for them to take it to a referendum. And if you have an inactive government that is not doing what the people like, you need the ability to have initiative, so that they can initiate laws through action that's outside of the council and the chair if they feel that they need to. And so these are kinds of things that, that give people the peace of mind that the government isn't totally out of control, and it's something that they can have access to, and that truly the government serves the people as opposed to the government being the people."

Ian Record:

"I want to follow up on a couple of points you raised during your description of the reform process, or not the reform process, actually the development process involved with the new constitution at Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and that is this issue of separations of powers. And you described very early on that separation doesn't necessarily mean non-communication between legislative and the executive branches of government, or the executive and legislative functions of government, that you need to have that communication so that each side is making informed decisions, and that separation doesn't necessarily mean there's no interaction between the two."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yeah. Yeah that's...you have to have a method for communication, and you need to...I think that it's, one of the things that I advocate for is when there is a law that's going to be held, that's going to be, that's being considered, that the legislative body hold a hearing on it and call in the executive to be witnesses at that hearing to ask questions about how something is working, ask questions about how this new law would work if it were passed, get opinions about whether they think it would work. Because if...it's one thing to out of, out of the air to sort of create a law that you think works, but when you, if it's, when it's implemented through the executive side, you can't have something that won't work that is, you know, you can, you can't sort of force something to work, you need to know if there's some likelihood that it's going to work. And so you may not, you may have executive function, executive people who don't like the law because it may be going to do away with their job, or it may be you're going to create more work for them, or it maybe going to make them do something that they don't like. But that's not enough reason to not pass the law. But if you pass a law that has one part of government doing one thing, and the other part of government undoing it, you need to understand that, you need to know what the implications are from how things are going to work. And so it's a good idea to have public hearings, to have this debate, and to have a longer debate over the legislation so that you have an idea how it's going to function. And plus things take a while to implement.

An example of this: we passed a notary public law, and this particular law was one that took...we built an implementation period into the law and there was a lot of communication back and forth between the executive and the...you know we gave a markup back to the legislature to look at, to think about it, and we went through the different things that would be necessary to consider. And we thought a six-month time period to implement it would be fine. So we set out, once it was passed, to get the surety bonds for notaries, and were assured that that wasn't going to be no problem, a couple of different companies told us there'd be no problem, they did that regularly. And then we had to get embossers and stamps. Well this was a tribal notary law, so when we went to get the companies to do it they said, ‘Yeah, we'll do that send us your stuff.' And we sent the stuff and they said, 'Oh, wait a second, you know, where's your state stuff?' And we said, ‘Well, this is not a state, it's the tribe.' Oh we can't do that. And one after the other, they were falling by the wayside, saying, ‘You know, they couldn't do it.' So we had to actually find a company that...and we found one eventually who said, well see this is a tribal law and this is, you know, we showed them, we talked about the constitutional issues and all this, and they, and they understood, they finally got around to understanding it. So eventually they agreed to pay us $50 for us to license them in order to produce our stamps and embossers. And part of the thing was is they realized, they said, 'Now how many tribes are there?' We said, ‘There's over 500.' They said, ‘Oh, maybe we could do this.' And so we have one company who agreed to do this. We think we're the first tribe in the country to actually have our own notary public law this way, because we couldn't find anybody who would produce the stamps and embossers until we worked with them. Then when we went to get the surety bonds for the notaries, the companies who assured us they could do it suddenly realized they couldn't do it because all of their stuff was for state authorized notaries and they had, they just couldn't figure out how to deal with it. We finally found a company who...it took months. We had to get a six-month extension on our six months to implement the law because this took so long and we finally found a company who, an executive there had just returned from a seminar on insurance and one on dealing with tribal sovereignty issues. And he was really intrigued, and he came back the next day and got this call from us and he said, ‘You know, let's try this.' And so he set out to develop a special form, and all the different things.

So we have, we developed a product, which we think is unique in the insuring for tribal notaries. And there's now ten notaries licensed at Little Traverse, within our tribal jurisdiction, for notarizing documents. The average person needs a notary once or twice in their life. This isn't a big, sexy thing for tribal sovereignty. It's not something you're going to get headlined on a paper and all these other kinds of things, this isn't it, but exercising sovereignty is not just those big things. Exercising sovereignty is all the grunt work. You know it took years to develop the statute to get the council in the right mind to think it would be something that needed to be passed. And then it took some of the tribe people in tribal community said, ‘You're doing what? You know, why would we need to do that?' And you know, but we eventually got people around to the idea that it was as good idea. It's an exercise of sovereignty and it's part of good governance for us to be doing these things. So this took a lot of communication back and forth between the legislature and the executive. And it's an example of a law that worked, and we -- not only did we do this -- but we also notified the governor's office of the state, said we're doing this, and her attorney, and we talked through all of that. You know we have regular meetings with the executive office of the state, annual meetings in Michigan, and we, because we were, we did these things, we didn't surprise anybody with what we were doing, and now that's the way we function, now we got this going. But that, that one law is an example of the utilization of the provisions within the constitution for the passage of a law, and the implementation of it, and how it worked. And I think it's a good example of good communication and, you know, making things, doing some of that grunt work and the assertion of sovereignty."

Ian Record:

"Really what you're talking about, on one level, is education: education of internal to the government then also education of the citizenry. And I wanted to follow up on that point. You know, we've seen...NNI works with a number of Native nations on the issue of constitutional development, constitutional reform, and we often see tribes either fail during the constitutional reform process, never make reform happen, or they encounter a lot of problems after they've ratified a new constitution, or reformed one because of this issue of education. Doesn't the education challenge only begin with the new constitution? Isn't there an ongoing education process that has to take place? Because, you know, it's one thing to change a document on paper, it's another thing to change the political culture, which has been at work in the community often for 60, 70, 80 years.

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well...there's, you know, we evolve as a society. One of the things I can think of is, when I was young, if someone was drunk, the police officer often would say, ‘Give me your keys. Get in the car.' And he'd drive them home, and leave the car sitting beside the road. And, you know, that was something that was fairly common. Today, that's far from the way things happen, you know. I mean today, we as a society, we have ceased to sort of look the other way at that issue, and have really focused on it as a negative thing within our society, and all the ramifications of driving and drinking. I have, you know, we're doing major educational campaigns on TV, we do this all across the country. And, so as a, the United States as a nation has really, the culture has changed as to how we deal with that. Well, the same thing happens when we're looking at how we deal with our institutions within our government structure, you know. The question that I have is, for people, is how often have they attended a township board meeting, or a county commission meeting, or a city commission meeting, or the state legislature, or the U.S. Congress. The average citizen, there are many, many citizens who never attend any of those meetings, ever. Live their lives and do just fine, they're fine, productive members of society and very successful and whatever, and they've never attended any of those. And yet, when we look at our tribal governments, we often, you know we get so wrapped up in our tribal governments that we start to try to make them into everything. Once again as I say, ‘Not the tribe, the government being the tribe, not the government serving the tribe.' And so citizens of our tribal nations often demand of their elected officials things that they wouldn't demand of elected officials that, from other places that they live, other communities that they interact with. And they, in so doing the, we get very little education about how to function.

What education and the way government works in our schools, usually, is all based on non-Indian governments. I was involved in a project for a textbook printed for the state of Michigan, or I was one of the people interviewed and part of the development of this for fourth grade. And this was the best textbook that we'd ever had up to this point because, and it's a major publisher and it was put together in a way that a number of schools throughout the state are using it now, it's titled ‘Michigan.' But what it did is it, Indians didn't disappear after the first paragraph, or the first chapter like we often do in books on history of the state. But we made it to about the middle of the book in the first edition. Second edition is about to come out and my understanding is we make it clear through the end of the book in this one. But people actually are going to understand when...kids will hear that we have constitutional governments. They'll hear that tribal governments exist today, instead of the question...I used to do a lot of speaking to fourth-grade classes and different places around the state of Michigan. One person said, ‘How long have you been an Indian?', question like that, and uh, 'What do Indians eat and where do you eat it?', and things of this sort. Of course they, there's certain stereotypical answers to those questions that they'd like answers to, but...it's because we need to address those issues, and so that as people become adults they understand that tribal governments are governments. We're not clubs, we're not associations, we're not part of history and long gone -- we actually exist and are around and have a major effect. We are, have far more visibility in the economic world because of the casinos and employing a lot of people these days. But far more than that, we have an effect on the way the environment, environmental issues are dealt with. We have an effect on law enforcement, we have an effect on the various social programs and things that are going on. Tribes have a major effect within their communities for both their citizens and for the non-tribal citizens as well.

And so today, things are much different than they once were, but we're still suffering from this lack of education about who we are. I once got the door-knocker award, which was literally a brass doorknocker still in its package from the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes for, we have an impact week every year in Washington D.C., and I went to that meeting and we would hold a breakfast where we'd talk and we go out on [Capitol] Hill and do meetings on the Hill, then we'd come back and we'd talk about what we'd done and, the sort of a summary of what we'd done and what things we need to do. I got the award because I'd taken a copy of the U.S. constitution. I had a lot of meetings. I was very energetic. And I took a copy of the U.S. constitution and I went in and I talked to the staff in all the offices I went to and I asked them if they'd ever read the Commerce Clause. Did they understand what, about treaties? It's sort of like 'Indian 101' in a way, the basics of Indian law relative to the constitution. And a huge number of the staff, a college-educated staff in the U.S. Congress, did not, had never read the Commerce Clause, with the idea of looking at tribal sovereignty through it. They didn't understand what it meant. They didn't, they never looked at the thing about treaties being the supreme law of the land, and understanding that meant Indian treaties. Never understood those things. And so this kind of education at that point is necessary. So what do we need in order to make our tribes work? Our own citizens are a product of this same sort of general education system that doesn't teach much about Indian law, Indian societies. And if nothing we're sort of curiosities and different things. Very little is that taught. So not only do our own citizens, as a product of this other education system, but they also need to understand their own government. They need to understand their own constitution. Nowhere are those classes taught. You know, they don't have a, you can't go and just take a class on the tribal constitution, and very few tribes have anything like this. So I've read, and I know other people who have advocated for tribal civics classes. We need to try to make sure that this is done.

One of the things that I feel that helps with this is I proposed a educational standards act for the tribe that would lay out what some basic goals were for different levels of say, elementary education, secondary, post-secondary, adult, you know, adult continuing education. What kind of things should we expect from each of these different age groups, and what...once we set some goals, then how do we achieve those goals? And one of the things that we did at Little Traverse that was done by, funded through the tribal council, but done by a number of different members of the community, is we created a video called ‘Journey to Sovereignty' that talks about the process of getting a reaffirmation bill passed and goes back into time, back into the history of why it became necessary to do it in the first place, and then how we went about doing it, and interviews with people. And it sort of told the story while the people were alive and we've got a record of it. And then we made a copy of that and mailed it to every tribal member, whether they were one month old or eighty, whatever, everybody got one. And then we continually show that at our hotel. We have the Odawa Channel at our hotel, and we show that video, a 'Four Directions' video. We have anther video on the history of the operation and some of the tribe. And we just have these showing in continuous loops so that, as a way to educate those people who are our guests who come to visit the tribe, but also for our own citizens who spend time there. And we periodically show these at other events just as a way to help people understand some of the history. Well it's things like that video, and other types that will be the tools that we need to actually get an educated citizenry about our systems.

So how does our system work? This is a long answer to your question, and I'm eventually getting back to your question here, that we need to have a mechanism for having an educated citizenry so that when we make changes in our governments, they understand what they're doing, they understand, you know, what this is likely to be. Once we made changes, as we implement them, they'll understand what those are. So we need education. It's like bringing in the consultants and helping educate the people who are about to serve under the new constitution. That seminar, that one-day training we had really helped move us through the transition. Now there will be, you know, we since have had others where we've brought people back in and looked at it again. And I'm sure that there will be continual training as we look at the documents and try to help them, and then look at our laws and see what laws we need to pass. We've had similar training when it came to dealing with the issues of Violence Against Women [Act, VAWA], and the personal protection orders and safety, issues of...we needed a victims rights act, we needed a, to strengthen a bunch of different laws. And we had a training where we brought in and talked about what we needed to do to work on this. We've had other trainings when it came to the implementation of, for instance the Adam Walsh Act, which by the way I just heard just recently that there are only three governmental entities that are compliant with the act, and it's overdue: one state and two tribes that have become compliant in the implementations of this federal law in the protection of children. But we're continually trying to do this through education. But as a basic form of this, we need to have this civics education. Each tribal nation needs to have a nation-specific course in how this is taught. We need to have general ones that help educate larger groups of people. We need to make sure like...I think there ought to be one of these in every law school. Every law school ought to have a class on dealing with sovereignty issues and dealing with tribes. Because many of those attorneys are going to end up serving before a tribal court somewhere, having to actually not just be a member of the power of Michigan, in the state of Michigan or in another state, but they're going to have to become members of the bar of different tribes in order to serve before those courts. And they need to understand what that means. So, you know, there's a need for an educated citizenry as a whole, and I think that this kind of training and education needs to not just be at the tribal level for our citizens, but also needs to be in the general public education as well."

Ian Record:

"If you could summarize for us, perhaps the three or four highlights of your new constitution -- the one adopted in 2005 -- in terms of perhaps what are the most important components within the constitution that advance your Nation's nationhood?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, it would be easy to say, the separation of powers, the branches of governments and things, but I actually think that there are other components that are important here. The first one is a declaration of rights. It's like a bill of rights, but it's actually incorporated into the constitution. That is an important part of this constitution. A second part of the constitution I think that's important is the assertion of the inherent rights, and the fact that we acknowledge that others may have inherent rights, other peoples may have inherent rights. And this document lays out a process, which eventually could result in like a state department, or diplomatic relations with other nations, other nations being other tribal nations, or foreign nations to the United States, or, for instance, relations with the United States itself. You know, they all want to see, check with us to make sure that we're recognized. And when is the last time a tribe asked the federal government to apply for recognition before it's government? And I think that the reciprocal is equally true, and I think that that's something that we should do. We need to realize that that's a two-way street; it isn't just the one-way street. There are tribal organizations who the only way that you can be a member of those organizations is if you're a federally recognized tribe. Well, if you, if you're looking at that, you're basically, the organization is giving up to the federal government the right to decide which among the tribes are going to be able to be members of this tribal organization. As opposed to making that decision asserting their sovereignty and making that decision their own government.

Now it's real easy to say this from a, just a, it's a simple assertion, it's a simple bunch of words. It's a lot of work to actually have to figure out who you're going to have, what other governments you're going to have relations with, and not, and what the criteria is for doing that, and how you choose when you're not choosing just federally recognized tribes. You know, a state-recognized tribe may, and we've had state recognized tribes come to Little Traverse and ask for diplomatic relations, asked us to recognize them. We've had non-recognized, either by federal or state, tribal governments come to us and ask us for acknowledgement. And we have yet to actually work through the mechanisms of that, but one of the important things in this constitution is it lays out the groundwork. It lays out that the basic part of that we will recognize other governments who acknowledge us. And so, I think that's one of the most important parts of this. Because the document, the document itself lays out how we're going to relate to other governments. And I think that's critical. And so those are, those are some of the really important points I see is that there's that, the bill of rights, and then of course the delegation of authority, which in our case is to separation of power branches, different branches. But you could have a constitution that did these previous things, and then set up a different system. This works for us, it doesn't necessarily, wouldn't necessarily work for every tribe. And there may be others that are at different places in their development, different places in their history, that they feel that a different form of government would work. This isn't the only one that works, but this, the document itself, that assertion of inherent sovereignty and the ability to acknowledge other governments, and interact with them, is a fundamental part.

Now the most important part I think in the end of the constitution, that is there, is the statement, the flat assertion of the importance for, that the government is charged with protecting our heritage, our history, and our language -- that these are things that...it's a lens through which we have to look at the rest of the actions and the rest of the constitution. It isn't something that is merely an afterthought or, if you have time do this, or maybe you can do this you know if you get around to it. It's...this is the basic charge to the government so that we have to look at a, when we create a new department, is it furthering these ends? And that's something that, because it's there in the document, it's a tool that our citizenry can measure the effectiveness of their elected leadership as to whether they're doing what they wanted them to do or not."

Ian Record:

"This gets, this is a good segue into another question I wanted to ask, and your statement that you just made merges rather well with the statement I want to share with you that was voiced by a fellow tribal leader who's nation had recently developed a new constitution. He said and I quote, ‘The new constitution is our long-term strategic plan.' So how do you see that statement?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well I think that it, I would look at it that the new constitution, I mean this constitution for us is like the, vision statement and the mission statement. It isn't necessarily the plan. It lays out the fundamentals through which you then would develop your plan. And so to, I would sort of carry that a little further in that, that it clearly sets out, you know, the vision for what the tribe should be, and what the tribe is, and what the people want the tribe to be. And that's the important, an important step. And then, you know, the mission, and it's sort of how you're going to do it is laid there. But the actual specific objectives, you know we were fairly careful to not put specific like objectives and things of that sort into it because those may change over time. We wanted something that would last, not something that every twenty years you'd have to get a new constitution."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up also on this point of culture. Essentially this is, as the culture, the history, the language, the heritage of your people being the lens through which your government would be organized in through, in the lens through which it would decide key matters, and who would decide those key matters. How does you nation's constitution express your people's culture, identity, and goals?"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, it expresses it through a preamble. And I don't have the words memorized, but it lays out the, who we are, it makes a statement of who we are, it makes a statement of what we, what we wish things to be, you know, to perpetuate our culture. And, so we have that section in the preamble, but then it also, there are directives to the government. And not just the preamble that sort of lays out the general tone for the document, but then there's the, this directives to the government and each, that the government's directed to do these things and to perpetuate the language and to protect the youth and protect our elders and to further the safety and to protect the right to work of our members and things of those sort. So we have these things that are built right in, and there's directives to the government. And those things are...we're directed to protect our heritage and culture. And so instead of...heritage and culture and spirituality blend and, but to the extent that we also have freedom of religion within the document so that it's not just, we're not, we promote our heritage and culture, but we tolerate and we're directed that if we have people who are choosing other paths, that we, that they're acknowledged, and their right to do that is acknowledged within our document as well.

So the government has to work on -- like the video that I described earlier -- it helps to protect our, get people understanding what different people in our tribe have done. I mentioned earlier that educational standards act, to me that's an essential part of meeting the constitutional responsibility of protecting our heritage because we want people to know what that is. I ask this question, 'How many of a tribe's citizens can name five chiefs from the 1800s and tell you a little about their lives, what they did? Now how many can name five presidents and tell you a little bit about those presidents?' So, the answer is many more to the second and very few to the first usually. Occasionally there are exceptions, but this is something that we need to try to fix. We need to have people understand who we are because, when I mentioned earlier there's a, we need to have a strong sense of place. And that sense of place is, it's multi-dimensional when you think about a sense of place. A sense of place isn't just the rocks and the trees and the streams and the things, you know. It isn't just that physical place, it isn't your home, or your town. But your sense of place is also your understanding of where you fit into your society. How you fit into your culture. How you fit into the history. And how you fit into your society, and where you fit in your language, where you fit in your, in, how you fit between the past and the future. You know? That interaction between them, that sense of place, that strong, assured sense of place is an attribute of a healthy individual. And as you have healthy individuals, you then have a healthy society. And so we need to try to help do things that foster that strong sense of place. And I believe that this constitution for Little Traverse helps to lay that out. We made every effort we could to make sure that those things would be part of that so that the government would actually; we could measure the success of a government.

When you do, when you work on documents like this, when you work on things like this, you have to prepare for when you're not going to be there. So, you know, you help pass laws so that, if need be, when you're no longer in the, an elected official, you can sue the government if you wanted. You need to make sure that there's, that there's, you know, the ability to do that. You need to make sure that you have the ability to initiative if a government becomes unresponsive and needs to be moved. You need to make sure that you have these things. So you have to build in all these safeguards to make things work well. And so, part of good governance is planning for your own obsolescence."

Ian Record:

"We've heard one leader describe that as, 'Mmy job is to make myself dispensable.'"

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Yeah. I think that's a good way to put it. I like that."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to...you mentioned this early on in the discussion about this interim constitution that you had prior to the passage of the public law that reaffirmed your status in the, at least in the minds of the federal government, as a sovereign nation. And then the new constitution and the difference, inherent between those in terms of dispute resolution, in terms of a, your tribe's, your nation's justice system."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Right."

Ian Record:

"Can you do a quick compare and contrast between the strength and independence of your court system of your dispute resolution within your nation, within the interim system, versus your current system."

Frank Ettawageshik:

"Well, the first constitution, which was actually was a document that involved, and it initially, in its very early incarnations had some of the very typical language where every action within it required approval from the Bureau [of Indian Affairs], okay. You know, so that was a pretty typical of some of the early ones. And so by the time that we actually had it in place so that we were using it at the time of the passage of the reaffirmation act, so it became our interim document, we'd removed all those sections about approval of the Bureau on our legislation. But some constitutions, every single law, every single action that's passed by the council, had to go to the Bureau for approval. They'd have to analyze it, look at it, and when it came back signed from the Bureau then they'd, then they'd become law. Well, you know, that, we didn't have that. But we did have this thing that, with the judiciary, we passed a law that would create a court under the old constitution. And consequently we hired the judge. And the judge worked under contract through this, the law that we passed and, had we chosen, had we disliked the judge we could have fired the judge. And, or dislike a decision that the judge made we could have. The fact that we didn't meant that we respected the fact that we needed an independent court, and we needed to stay out of the court's affairs. But, you know, had things, you know, we certainly had the ability to do that under that old constitution. And that, you know, that isn't a really strong, it doesn't give...

If you're signing a contract with a company that you want to do business with, and the contract requires that you go to tribal court, and you -- because you want to assert sovereignty -- and there's no guarantee that the court will look like the current court. There's no guarantee what the court will look like at the time that the dispute would be taken to them. Or you could change the appearance and the operation of the court during a dispute, during the resolution of a dispute, it makes it a lot less comfortable for someone to acknowledge the sovereignty of your court, and to want to come to your court. And so they're going to demand that you have a waver of immunity, and that you take everything to federal or state courts because they don't have confidence in the tribal system. Your own citizenry have less confidence in the court itself when the court changes or is subject to change that quickly. So under the old system I, it was fairly weak. And it was judicial reform, I think is critical for government development, and probably is the fundamental reason why many constitutions are looked at in the first place. Even if nothing else is changed in them. To have an independent court is a move in the right direction.

Well, under the new constitution the judges are appointed, they're nominated by the executive, and then the nominee goes to the tribal council who holds hearings and talks to the people and asks them in-depth questions like, you know, what do they believe about different issues of constitutional law and, you know, what are they, you know, they ask them the same kind of tough questions that they get asked at any, you know, cause they realize that they're, if they approve the judge the judge is going to be there for a while and, and will have an effect, those rulings will have an effect on the tribal law.

And so as a chief executive, I have nominated, my nominees sometimes were approved, and my nominees were sometimes rejected, and I'd have to go back to the drawing board, come up with someone else. But once the judges were appointed under the new constitution, once they're appointed, there's a trial judge, an associate trial judge, and then three appellate justices. So the judiciary is five appointees. The judiciary itself, after they're appointed, are the only members who can remove a judge. Now, petitions can be brought from other places, I mean the citizens can bring a petition, the council can petition, the executive can petition for removal of a judge. But once a complaint's made, the other members of the judiciary meet to decide if the complaint has merits, and they've had to develop their rules on how they deal with all of this, but they're the ones who remove a judge. So the judiciary polices itself.

Now they also have terms so that an executive can choose to not re-nominate somebody as their term ends. And even if they were re-nominated, if the, if people brought pressure to bear on the council to say we don't like this person, we don't think he should approve this nomination, they can do that. So that's the mechanism for getting rid of a judge and for dealing with the...dealing with the court. All of those are important parts of the process to, for people to have faith that the court will actually do what you think it's going to do. And our court actually developed to the point where we, we had a youth drug court that was part of the court system. And the process that we did through that was so well accepted that we had local state judges who were assigning people to this from their own jurisdictions, as opposed to just our own. And they would be, attend these programs. And so there's those kind of issues. Because of the strength we've had in terms of developing the judiciary, and because of the strength of the constitution and the things that we've put together, we have cross-deputization agreements with two counties.

Our reservation is, resides, is part of two of the counties in the state of Michigan, and we have cross-deputization agreements with both of those sheriffs. So not only have our officers been sworn in by those sheriffs as deputies, but the sheriff and his deputies came to our courtroom. And when we first did this, I administered an oath to them to uphold our tribal constitution, and our tribal laws. And we had a detailed agreement on how we would exercise that, you know. They couldn't just come in on their own. They would come in, there's a protocol for how they come in when they need to, or when we back each other up. And so we developed seamless law enforcement that was to the betterment of health and public safety for not only our citizens, but for the non-tribal citizens who are a part of the whole region in which we live."