Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host Ian Record. On today’s program, we welcome Suzan Harjo. Suzan Harjo is a woman of many talents. Not only is she the President and Executive Director of the Morning Star Institute, which is a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native people’s traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research, but she’s also a poet, writer, lecturer and curator. So welcome here to Tucson, Suzan. Why don’t you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself."

Suzan Harjo:

"Okay. Well, I’m Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. My mother was Cheyenne and my father was Muscogee Creek and I was raised culturally in both ways in Oklahoma. And I’m a writer and that took me to New York City and it took me to Washington, D.C. and a lot of what I write is federal Indian law. So I’ve developed the line of cultural rights for Native people for a long time from the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to the follow on legislation of repatriation and I was part of the coalition in 1967 after our ceremonies at Bear Butte in South Dakota that began work that led to museum reform to the National Museum of the American Indian to repatriation law and to the Religious Freedom set of laws and policies."

Ian Record:

"Well, great. And we’re going to talk about a lot of those policies that you’ve been involved in firsthand, but first I wanted to start at the basic level essentially and discuss sovereignty. And what I wanted to ask you is the word sovereignty means a lot of different things to different people. It’s a word when you’re working on the ground in Indian Country you hear tossed around all the time and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I was wondering if you could just talk to us and tell us how you define sovereignty for Native nations."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, the reason you hear so many definitions is first of all we think it’s an Indian word and we don’t think it means jurisdiction and who controls the king’s animals and that sort of concept of sovereignty that comes from Europe. Sovereignty is the act of sovereignty. We as Native nations are inherently sovereign and whatever we do to act sovereign is the definition of sovereignty."

Ian Record:

"It was interesting, I was actually in a panel presentation yesterday in Denver with David Lester, who’s the Executive Director of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes and he was discussing this exact question that 'sovereignty' inherently is a western term. It’s a colonizer’s term. And he defined sovereignty as, ‘it’s our right to be who the Creator intended us to be,’ and he said it’s really no more than that. And then he went on to talk about things like economic development, for instance, is just one of many ways that we work to become the people that the Creator intended us to be. I hear that same sort of refrain in your answer."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, when something’s inherent, it’s inherent. You are who you are from the inside out and it’s not something that’s over layered either in law or in policy and it’s not something that the Europeans brought from Europe. It is your language. Speaking your language is an act of sovereignty. Reclaiming your language is an act of sovereignty. So the way it’s used by many people is simply as jurisdiction or simply as gaming operations and that’s so limiting. That’s really myopic, but for some Native nations that’s all they have. They don’t have their language anymore or they don’t have other vestiges of sovereignty but we have those things that define us. We have our rights of selecting citizens, setting citizenship criteria, saying who we are and who we aren’t, who is not part of us. That is an act of sovereignty. Citizenship is an act of sovereignty. We’re not, where I think we’re kind of falling down is that a lot of our people are not respecting our Native nations, but that’s something that has been taught to us and laid on us by federal and state government and private people who have, teachers and others in public schools who for so many decades and generations disrespected our elders, disrespected our traditions, disrespected our languages, disrespected our children, on and on and on and said that we were nothing, we were dead, gone, buried, forgotten at the end of the 1800s. So it is no surprise that a lot of our people do not have a strong sense of civics about our own nationhood and our own sovereignty and our own personhood. We have to get through a lot of self-hatred, a lot of this internalized oppression. These are more than buzz phrases. This happened to us. When the federal government issued civilization regulations in the mid-1880s that outlawed the Sun Dance and all other so-called ceremonies, that outlawed Indian languages, that outlawed the so-called practices of a medicine man and characterized all that was traditional and fine and good as heathen and pagan and hostile and improper and illegal for which the people were punished mightily, some of them unto death. That was interference and suppression, social suppression, national suppression, tribal suppression, personal suppression, religious suppression of a high and low order for 50 years. They were not lifted until the 1930s. So when you have that kind of generational oppression, it doesn’t go away in one generation or two generations and still today, the question I’m asked most often when I work with different nations to undertake enterprises, things that are acts of sovereignty, the first thing I’m asked is, ‘Will this make them mad?’ Hey, well, and what are they going to do, take away the Western hemisphere? I hope it makes them mad. So sovereignty is the act of sovereignty. It’s whatever people do with their inherent powers."

Ian Record:

"Well, thank you for that answer. I wanted to move on now to again some of these monumental policy initiatives and changes in Washington that you’ve been a direct part of. As you know, since the 1960s and certainly the 1970s Native nations have aggressively moved to strengthen and expand their exercise of sovereignty. Can you describe this process from your point of view and your direct experience with that?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I reject the premise of the question. Native nations have moved aggressively to exercise sovereignty since coming into contact with the White man. There’s no beginning in the ‘60s or beginning in the ‘70s, so I reject the premise of the question. Native nations throughout the 1900s in the Pacific Northwest, for example, were moving aggressively to carry out their treaty fishing rights and treaty hunting rights and treaty gathering rights and they were stopped continually by federal and state people who denied that there were treaty rights, denied their part of the treaty in upholding the fishing rights of the people. So much so that in the ‘70s when the treaty fishing rights case that’s called the Boldt Decision finally went to the Supreme Court and was decided in 1979, the Supreme Court in effect said, ‘This case has been before us five times this century. We don’t want to see it again.’ They had consistently ruled that the Indians were right. They had consistently upheld the treaties. So what you are asking is when America started paying attention to Indian rights, when the general public started saying, ‘Oh, maybe the Indians aren’t all dead.’ That’s not the same as Native nations vigorously pursuing and aggressively pursuing sovereign powers and sovereign rights. Native nations all over the country were trying to do what it was we were entitled to do through the orderly processes of our nations and the United States in our nation to nation relationship, which is now sometimes diminished and called a 'government-to-government' relationship, but that really is lowering the bar. So I would submit that our nations never stopped being who we are and we often were not heard or our efforts were thwarted. And why? Because one side had superior weaponry. We don’t have the nuclear bomb so of course we’re going to lose some contests. But did we roll over and play dead? No. And I don’t think that there has been a more vigorous or a less vigorous assertion of sovereignty or sovereign rights since, well, at anytime. I don’t think there’s been an ebb and flow. I think that’s a fiction."

Ian Record:

"Well, with respect to your involvement, I believe you’ve been in D.C. fighting these battles since the ‘60s and I was wondering if you could just talk about your experience there and I think in particular with respect to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. That didn’t happen overnight. That was the fruition of many years of hard fought battles and can you talk about those battles and how, essentially what was going on throughout the country manifested itself in this major policy shift in Washington?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I didn’t get to Washington until the end of 1974, but I was outside of Washington watching the process, observing how things are done in Washington and as a journalist in part and as a radio producer in part and as a part of Native delegations to Washington. So I understood how things worked, but I was an outside person when we developed the ideas, when we envisioned the National Museum of the American Indian I was not in Washington. That was a result of our elders saying, ‘After ceremonies, don’t go away...,’ in June of ‘67, ‘...stay for meetings and let’s figure out how to do these things.’ And we came up with a whole agenda of how to gain more respect in American society and in how to elevate our status and get mummies out of, off display and that sort of thing. It was a whole agenda of respect. Now at that same time, a lot of Native people were doing other kinds of things that were developing economic development or other kinds of work in other areas and our common problem was in the way that Indian affairs were ignored in Washington, D.C. except by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then they were controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That common realization by young people, older people, elders and people who were in tribal leadership position, people who were religious leaders and people who were, as I was at the time, a practitioner of traditional religion. We all came to the same realizations that something had to be done with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Everyone having that realization led to an effort for Native nations to gain more control and for the BIA to have less control because in the ‘70s when we started going to...I first went to Washington in the early ‘70s, early ‘60s with my tribal delegation. They selected me and a boy when we -- Cheyenne boy and me -- when we were seniors in high school in Oklahoma City and they took us to Washington with them. And we were supposed to, it was the custom, stop by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and let them know where we planned to go. And so our act of resistance was that our business committee, our tribal leaders didn’t stop by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and we were followed around town by them as we went to the Justice Department, as we met with people on Capitol Hill and the Bureau of Indian Affairs agents would be short, right behind us and it was, and they were upset that we didn’t stop and talk with them and tell them where we were going so they had to follow us. That was their duty, that was their mission. So that’s the kind of thing that people were experiencing. The Bureau of Indian Affairs people really thought they controlled Indian tribes. So out of that, now it could have taken many forms. People really liked the title rather than the law itself, 'self-determination,' because it sounded good but a lot of people talked about it as self termination as well and weren’t quite sure that, there were some people who were very invested in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and having a strong federal agency presence because they had lived through termination and the severing of the federal tribal relationship so they wanted something that was solid and strong in Washington to act as an advocate for Indian people. For the most part though, it was not being an advocate for Indian people and the Indian Health Service was also perceived as something that wasn’t doing the job that it should do and there were so many people dying of the flu and colds and pneumonia in Indian Country, not to mention tuberculosis and the other far more serious in general society problems, but it was the common stuff that was taking its toll in Indian Country. So you had people in poverty, ill health, ill housed and the worst, the worst of the worst on the demographic ladder, Indians were always at the bottom of everything, the lowest employment. Anyway you could measure how a society was doing or how a people were doing, we were the worst. We were doing the worst. And so everyone understood that something had to be done to get more power to the tribes and to have more of the functions of the BIA -- that is money, that really translates into money -- transferred to the Indian tribes and that’s what was so important about the Indian Self Determination Act, not that it was a great law. You read it and say, ‘This is not much,’ but it was something and it was the answer to the anger that was building by everyone. Everyone was very upset, very angry and you had people in the Pacific Northwest being maimed and imprisoned for fishing under laws signed by the United States and treaties signed by their nation and the United States nation. 'How dare they do those things!' And so the outrage was very high and that was just a tiny escape valve for the federal government and good that it happened and it began, or helped, it helped further a trend that had begun under the [Lyndon B.] Johnson Administration where the Johnson Administration had tried to put a lot of social programs in the hands of tribes and make more social programs and more programs of general applicability available to the people, to the Indian people. And self determination under [Richard] Nixon/[Gerald] Ford, first the Nixon message and then the Ford law, was a furtherance of what the Johnson Administration had tried to do to get away from termination and get more money and power and programs in the hands of the people, just more local government. So that’s what that was all about. The Nixon 'Self-Determination' message, I remember Ramona Bennett who was the Chairwoman of the Puyallup Tribe in Washington State, coming to Washington and she said, ‘I came to Washington and everywhere I went the BIA, everywhere on Capitol Hill they handed me a copy of Richard Nixon’s 'Self-Determination' message. So I read it and read it and read it on the plane on the way home and got off the plane and we took over Cushman Hospital.’ And I thought that was just a marvelous example of what it set in motion. It did set in motion the self-determining of Native people that went beyond any sort of contracting law. It was sort of like your initial question about sovereignty. What is self determination? Doing what you, in their case, the tribe needed to take over Cushman Hospital and they did. And it was just funny that it was as a result of Richard Nixon’s statement on self-determination."

Ian Record:

"Yeah, that’s interesting you mentioned that example and also your characterization of the Self-Determination Act as a tiny escape valve, at least as far as the federal government conceded it because in the research of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project, what we’ve seen is a growing number of native nations beginning in the ‘70s and particularly since that time have driven essentially a Mack truck through that tiny escape valve and aggressively pursued self determination to a far greater scope than the federal government I think ever conceived through this law."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, yes. I was in part, I was one of the people that helped interpret the Self Determination-Act when I first worked for the National Congress of American Indians and we did a lot of testifying on Capitol Hill in ‘75, and ‘75 about the meaning of the Self-Determination Act, who could do what with it, what it meant and how it could be used to benefit the Native people. And so we did look for every opportunity in the Act and if the Act was silent on something, we assumed we could do it because it didn’t say no. And that was a unique way of interpreting federal Indian law. It had been interpreted in the opposite direction by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a very long time that if something didn’t say explicitly that you could do something then the answer was no, you couldn’t do it. So we flipped that and started saying, if it doesn’t have an express prohibition against doing it, then do it, just don’t ask permission, just do it."

Ian Record:

"Just do it, the Nike slogan."

Suzan Harjo:

"Yeah."

Ian Record:

"As you know, a lot of the research of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project dating back to the mid- to late 1980s -- so you’re looking at essentially a decade after this Act was passed -- has focused on why some nations have been more successful than others in pursuing their goals of self determination, whatever those goals might be. They might be economic, they might be cultural, they might be social, etc. From your perspective, do you see any common factors that perhaps empower some tribes to be more successful in that regard and perhaps some factors on the flip side that perhaps get in the way of other tribes from moving forward and pursuing their goals and achieving their goals?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, before Jack Abramoff, it was customary for the community of Native nations to come together for the common good and develop programs or general laws in a way that could be useful, beneficial for all Native peoples. What the Abramoff scandal brought to light was that there were Native peoples who were just behaving like any corporation and trying to get the edge over any other corporation and when I ran the National Congress of American Indians during the ‘80s, that was never ever the custom or the practice. So up until the late ‘80s, until we got the gaming law, everyone was supporting everyone else so it was a, you came together for mutual support and if one group, if one intertribal organization wanted to do something, everyone would support them in that effort or just stand back, certainly not oppose them. So this idea of just one-upsmanship and edging out another Native nation for profit, for personal profit I think is a sad turn of events in our national Native efforts, and there’s just no accounting for greed and we have very greedy people among us. We have a lot of greedy white people among us, a lot of greedy other kinds of people, and we have our own homegrown greedy people. So what accounts for the success of one nation and not success of another? In part that kind of greed, an overload of greed on the part of a successful nation willing to undercut, keep down another Native nation. I think that’s what was brought to light by the Abramoff scandal and what a lot of our leadership hasn’t owned up to and are still some of them covering up and that’s unfortunate. So the specific success by one nation as opposed to another may be as a result of dirty tricks and undermining and throwing a lot of money to see that the other nation is not successful. That has translated into other kinds of rights in other parts of the country and you see a lot of ugliness one nation to another and that’s where it’s backfiring for a lot of people and the leaders who let Jack Abramoff have his way or who encouraged him or hired him because they wanted a pit bull are being turned out by the people because they’re saying, ‘At home we don’t want to be this kind of person. We don’t want to be this kind of nation. We don’t want to have this kind of Native tribal character. That’s not who we are.’ And I think that’s really good. So we had to have a kind of pot boiler to make people decide. Now some are just saying, ‘Heck, yeah, we want that. We want to be the richest ones. We want to be the most cutthroat. We want to be the meanest ones.’ So it’s in a way like everything else, it all comes down to people and it all comes down to leadership and the people having the kind of leaders that they want to have, putting in office the kind of people they want to represent them. Now it doesn’t mean that they wanted the Jack Abramoff clones or payers or dupes. It does mean though that when all of that was done with and they assessed what had happened, they took a sharp turn in the opposite direction, whatever the opposite direction was and that’s still sorting itself out. We’ve been impoverished for a long time and we’ve only been comfortable...some Native nations have been comfortable, some are mega rich, only a handful, some are comfortable and some are still way in the depths of poverty. So we have to figure out what’s keeping the people in the depths of poverty. If it’s not other Native nations doing that and keeping them down, is it the federal government keeping them down? There are still people in the federal bureaucracy who are dying to get control of Indian tribes again and some of them are doing it through the kind of carrot and stick flattery. You see many, I’ve been in Washington a long time and I see people, delegations come in and they do cow tow to the very, to federal bureaucrats and they do sell out very, for a photo op and they don’t insist on substance. Not everyone. I’m talking about just a small number of people who do this. The most successful of the tribal leaders will not do the photo op unless they have something to back it up with, unless they’ve gotten something for the people, unless they have some sort of really clear promise or a negotiated agreement or a law or they, it’s not just, ‘How nice can we be to the white people?’ but some people still have that orientation and a lot of people in Washington exploit that because there are still people who are on the payroll or on the side of for other non-monetary reasons the people who are trying to exploit our resources and the people who are trying to keep us from not just making money on things, but having them altogether. So there are still people who are trying to take our gathering places, who are certainly trying to keep control of our sacred places. That has not stopped and there is a predictable backlash against any Native people that exercise sovereignty in any area, whether it’s water rights or gaming operations, whether it’s being too cultural. People get jealous of that and [say], ‘Give me some of that medicine.’ No matter what it is that is being exercised in a way that can be commodified, there are people who try to gain a share of that commodified entity or they try to take it away from Native people altogether and that’s still going on. There are still organized networks of people who call themselves in organizations 'anti-Indian' or 'equal rights' -- 'equal rights' is buzz word for no treaties, no special Indian rights. And this issue has been taken to the Supreme Court a lot and the Supreme Court always answers the same thing, ‘Special rights of Indians don’t interfere with the constitutional rights of non-Indians, so shut up.’ I mean, that’s what is supposed to happen, but that keeps going on. And in every way that Native nations raise a resource right or commit an act of sovereignty, there are non-Indian people who are there saying, ‘Either give me some or you don’t get to do that anymore.’ And why? Part of it is racism and an ancient fear that once in control of anything, Native people will be as bad to the non-Indians as the non-Indians have been to us. That is not our history. That is not our history. Whether you look at the Maine Indian land claim settlement of the claim to two-thirds of the state in a settlement for 300,000 acres of land, that was an act of compassion on the part of the Passamaquoddys and Penobscots in not suing every citizen in the claim area. That was an act of compassion because they said, ‘We don’t want to scare people the way our people have been scared.’ I thought that was so admirable of them and so they wanted their lawsuit held in abeyance pending the outcome of talks. They said, ‘Just talk to us.’ They didn’t want to go through an entire litigation process and hurt the people in that claim area. I thought that was extraordinary."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned sacred places, which is a good segue into my next question. As you mentioned, you were directly involved in the creation and the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Can you just describe what...how that act came about and really what was the impetus behind it and perhaps your perspective on its impact 30 years later?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I keep referencing this 1967 meeting, which was the nucleus of a coalition that became a national coalition for cultural rights and we had a second meeting, because we were mostly -- although there were people from other nations there at that ‘67 meeting in June -- we were mostly Cheyennes, Arapahoes and Lakotas, your basic Little Big Horn coalition. And we talked about a lot of things and realized that the Lakotas had different issues than the Cheyennes, even though we have so much in common, that there were slightly different things, slightly different experiences, different religions, different things that we had to do that we were being prevented from doing. So everyone had the ‘no trespassing’ signs in commons, the ‘no Indians and dogs allowed’ signs in common. We all had that in common, but what we realized was we needed to know more in order to do something that would help everyone and that was our goal was to help everyone. And it really was a, there was an emphasis on freedom. So we, and I can’t emphasize enough that we were still criminalized even though the civilization regulations had been lifted 30 years earlier, we were still criminalized when we practiced our religions and we were demonized by a lot of Native people too who had bought the whole bill of goods and who called us pagans and that sort of thing in resolutions and in letters to the BIA. So we realized that we had to do a lot of things to help ourselves and to help other people so, anytime that we tried to get to a sacred place that had been confiscated and turned into the public domain, we had to go through private property, federal property, sometimes state property and everywhere were these ‘keep out’ signs and ‘no trespassing’ signs and we were literally in order to continue a pilgrimage lifting barbed wire to get to these places. We still do that today in some places, so it’s not over, it’s not ended. So we wanted to see beyond that and make sure that in making ourselves free from a lot of these constraints that we weren’t imperiling anyone else. So kind of put out the word to different parts of the country what we were doing, what we were trying to do and that we wanted museum reform, we wanted a national cultural center, that’s what we called the museum facing the capitol and so the capitol, the people who were making laws about us would have to look us in the face. And we wanted something where people weren’t confiscated eagle feathers from us and we wanted the ‘no trespassing’ signs gone. So we got an invitation from Governor Robert Lewis to go to Zuni and so we went there, a pretty big delegation, and he had invited some other people and we had a similar set of meetings for a week and discussed what they needed and what they were afraid of and what they were confronted with and so that became, we were building a door like this and then it became a wider door, kind of a taller door. Everywhere we would go there would be another kind of issue that people wanted to be a part of this thing. So while we were building a door to get everyone through, we ended up with something that was very oddly configured and you can say the same sort of thing about all of these laws in the cultural rights realm, repatriation certainly is a good example of that, and the reason it doesn’t, these don’t look like other laws is because so many different cultures and so many different ways of dealing with issues had to be accommodated. And I do mean had to be. I mean, that was a real mission that everyone felt was we needed to be absolutely inclusive and to not have language that would restrict other people. So we just continued lots and lots of meetings like this, lots of gatherings, hundreds. We had hundreds of meetings of this kind, some later at Native American Rights Fund, some out in the open where everyone would camp, some at hotels in conjunction with Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians or National Congress of American Indians, and it was a very important movement that took hold in Washington and a lot of people were responsive. And the first two people I went to were Senator Barry Goldwater in this state and Senator Ted Kennedy because they were the most conservative and most liberal and then all you do is fill in the blanks in between. And both of them were so receptive and that’s when we really knew that we were going to prevail on a national Indian cultural rights agenda was when we were able to get really broad sponsorship and then in the House another person from Arizona, Congressman Morris Udall, was our champion there. So that, and if you look at the Religious Freedom Act and you look at the report of the president pursuant to the Religious Freedom Act, it was done after a year’s implementation. After a year’s implementation of 50 agencies' review of their rules and regulations in the context of Indian religious freedom, you see that it covers a lot of areas, it covers museum reform, sacred objects, sacred places. It’s quite a broad set of policies and the overall, overarching policy statement is to preserve and protect Native religious religions and practitioners of those religions. That was huge because it, the only, it had been the policy of the United States to destroy them. So that’s why we had to have an Indian religious act and why we had to have repatriation and the like, all the follow on legislation because this was a policy statement and then you go from there to make something that is specific to a topic. So that’s sort of how we got from the ‘67 meeting to just lots and lots of, they weren’t hearings, they were gatherings where we exchanged information and there was a lot of traditional knowledge sharing and learning that we were all doing. We all came away with in effect Ph.D.s in comparative religion. It was quite the thing. And I am so privileged to have been a part of that and to have been educated by so many extraordinary people. So that period was just an amazing thing. It was an, talk about an exercise of sovereignty. This was the people rising up and saying, ‘This is what we want and need and we need it to look like this.’ And that’s what repatriation was. We continued that same process from ‘78 when we did the Religious Freedom Act to ‘89 when we finally got the Indian museum and the historic repatriation provision agreement with the Smithsonian. And after that it took only 11 months to get it applied to the rest of the United States, to every other federal agency, educational institution and museum that was, that had any sort of federal tie. And that’s a pretty remarkable thing. And we literally got everything that we wanted and a process to try to do something about the things that were causing people so many nightmares. In part, our elders in ‘67 called us together because so many people were having nightmares about people who were held in these places and things that were held, our living beings, our sacred objects, that were being held in these places and they were describing them as prisoners of war. And at that point, we didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but by the ‘80s we had found the documentation to support what our oral history told us about beheadings. We knew there had to be a policy and a program to behead us and just because it was in everyone’s oral history, but we didn’t find until the ‘80s the information about the Indian crania study of the U.S. Army Surgeon General and we didn’t know until I started having negotiating sessions at the Smithsonian with Bob Adams, who was Secretary of the Smithsonian, that they had in fact 18,500 human remains, 4,500 skulls from the Indian crania study. We knew all of that from our own history, but we didn’t know how it was done until we found the paper, and thank goodness for the Magna Carta culture.

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and also NAGPRA, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and just get your sense, now that there’s been obviously 30 years since AIRFA, moving on 20 years, I believe, since NAGPRA. How have those two acts worked out in practice? Are they achieving the goals that those folks that you were initially working with had set out?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, AIRFA is a policy statement, so it is what it is and we expected to gain more follow-on legislation from it than we have. So our big failing would be in sacred places protection and what we need are legal protections for sacred places and what we’ve been doing is cobbling together protections made of all sorts of other laws and processes and then some outright buying of areas of sacred places. We can’t obviously buy everything and some things were taken from the Indian people and we were confined to reservations and not allowed by the civilization regulations to roam off the reservation. That was an act that was unlawful, to roam off the reservation and for all of these sacred places that were off reservation, they were attempting to stop the relationship between the place and the people going there to pray. So a lot of people went there anyway of course, but had to do it underground and had to, had to make themselves criminals and hostiles and fomenters of decent and all of that and risk imprisonment, withdrawal of rations, starvation and any open-ended sentence that an Indian agent might apply in his discretion. So these places, none of these places were taken properly. They were all stolen. These were our usual and accustomed places, these were places that it didn’t occur to our ancestors that we wouldn’t be able to go there. Yet we were stopped. It didn’t occur to them that someone would take them and say, ‘Now these are ours, not yours.’ But that’s what happened. So we haven’t fulfilled the hope that we had of securing legal protections of a general nature, of a national nature for these important places to all our peoples. As far as repatriation, that is a good example of what was supposed to happen. We did do follow-on legislation. We were able to get it and I think we were able to get it because we were able to find so much of the documentation that was about an area of American life that most people on Capitol Hill had no idea existed and they would say, ‘You’re kidding. This is what the United States did? How is this possible?’ And there it was in black and white, there it was in green boxes in museums. So we had a good case, we made a good case for repatriation and I think, and we set up three processes, two laws and one process at NMAI and they were all slightly different, they had slightly different standards, the legal standard, the test under the two laws, one for the Smithsonian and one for everyone else, was or is preponderance of the evidence, which is 5941. In the NMAI [National Museum of the American Indian] trustees repatriation policy that governs NMAI, we made that a reasonable belief standard to see if that would be different in its implementation from preponderance of the evidence, reasonable belief not quite requiring a majority of belief, however you quantify these things. And it hasn’t made all that much difference, I don’t think, proving to me at least the point that everything comes down to people. It matters who’s in the delegation on the tribal side, it matters who’s in the repository receiving side and when the people get together what is their interaction and what are their motives and are they really concentrated on the good of the Indian people, the public good for education. Are they truly concentrated on these things or is it about people looking at us as if we’re the butterfly collection or our people, our ancestors as if they’re the butterflies that are pinned down. That’s a different way of looking at the world and that’s not the kind of world that we made with the repatriation laws. We made something that was interactive, that would bring together the peoples who cared most about the subject and that it was supposed to be for the good. I think that they’ve accomplished that and they’re not finished and it’s a long process. It’s a long process because Native people, it’s not a simple matter to repatriate. No one has the ceremony for what you do when people come and dig up your grave and take your great grandma or your grandma to Washington or to University of Arizona or UCLA or the Colorado Historical Society. There’s no ceremony for that except for those who have it now. So everyone, and you don’t just invent ceremony all of a sudden. You have to say, ‘Is this like anything else? What happened when there was a flood and bodies floated up, what happened? Ah, we did this, we did that.’ So people have to think of other things that it’s most like and find a way to discuss it in a way that’s not just ripping the scab off everything that’s happened in the whole of the 500 years and find a way to discuss it in a way that everyone can be put back together again. So that’s a lot and that requires a lot. Repatriation has placed a tremendous burden on Native nations, which is usually discussed as a paperwork burden. Say, ‘Wow, we’ve got a mountain of paper.’ It’s put a tremendous burden on everyone, but when it’s done best, it’s a tremendous learning process because people, well, like the teachers say, everything is a teaching opportunity. This is a teaching and learning opportunity for everyone. It’s a way of talking to the artist in the community. We want our cultural patrimony back so you see these designs. We want our people back so people can stop having nightmares about them and we put them to rest finally. So it’s a small measure of justice in a very unjust history and an unjust world. The really smart thing we did in repatriation law in both the ‘89 and the ‘90 law and in the NMAI trustees policy was to leave the implementation of the law up to the people doing the repatriations themselves. And that was, well, we had two choices. We could have guessed and we would never have guessed right, never. There are so many surprises that have come up in the individual repatriations. Or we could do what we did, which was to punt. We agreed on the general policy, we agreed that there was going to be a repatriation law, we agreed that it would be human rights of Native Americans. All of that was agreed to. And then we didn’t tie everyone’s hands with too much law. We left a lot to be, the manner of repatriation, so people looking for guidance in the law need to look to the spirit rather than the letter and then to do what they agree to do because that’s the whole point. People are coming together for a common purpose and they need to do whatever they need to do to make it dignified, to make it respectful, to make it lasting or to make it an interim thing. They might just say, ‘This is what we’re doing for now, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to do it this way afterward,’ because it’s up to the current, to the living people to define cultural appropriateness, to do religious interpretation, to understand what the people need right now and then to, what kind of presentation? Does it need to be just something that’s written down and no one talks about it again? Does it need to be something done as a ceremony? Does it need to be something done that’s not a ceremony, but done with ceremoniousness? There are all sorts of ways to do these repatriations and the best thing is for the peoples to, on the Native side and on the repository side, to come together and to deal with it in the way that they can agree to deal with it. And that’s part of healing and that’s what we wanted to accomplish. So, and that’s what I hear from lots and lots of people who do repatriations is that they have accomplished that. But it takes a long time to get from point A to point Z. It just takes a long, long time. And sometimes you don’t quite get there, but you just run out of time or you run out of patience or you feel that it’s going in a negative rather than positive direction. There are lots of reasons that people decide that the end has been reached. Sometimes it’s a person on a particular repatriation committee knows they have three months in office or a tribal leader and they just have to get it done before then. Sometimes it’s a religious thing where the important thing is to get this back before this thing happens in the sky or before this kind of thing happens or to keep the salmon running or to keep the buffalo healthy. There are all sorts of community reasons that people do things or they just want not to deal with the subject anymore and to do, to resolve it quickly and quietly. There are all sorts of reasons for pace and style and as I said, I think that’s the smartest thing we did with the repatriation laws was to leave it up to the people."

Ian Record:

"You are also, among your many activities, one of the plaintiffs in the Washington Redskins trademark lawsuit, which has been going on for several years now."

Suzan Harjo:

"Sixteen."

Ian Record:

"Sixteen -- more than several. Just describe for us briefly why this suit was brought, what was the basis of it and what the current status of it is and essentially what larger problem it’s trying to address."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, all roads for me lead back to our ‘67 meeting at Bear Butte, which was just eye opening for me and the people kept talking about respect and respect and respect and how we were being, we were not being respected in general society and one of the things that got tossed around was all of the, all of these sports teams that were walking all over our good names and walking all over our reputations and that that was helping keep us down and helping make everything else possible and that not enough people were speaking out about it. And that really meant a lot for those of us who were from Oklahoma, where sports are a really big deal and we joined up with the effort already underway in Oklahoma to try to get rid of Little Red who was the mascot for the University of Oklahoma and that became the first of the American references in sports, Native American references in American sports to go by the wayside. It was ended...Little Red was the first dead mascot in 1970 and after that came Syracuse and Stanford and Dartmouth and a lot of others. Until this time, when we’ve eliminated over -- we collectively, not me, but we collectively -- have eliminated over two-thirds of the Native references in American sports. So we’ve won already. Now that’s in educational sports. In pro sports, not one has changed. So you have 2,200 in educational sports have changed, have dropped their stereotypes, not one in pro sports. So there was a trademark trial, a trademark lawyer, patent and trademark lawyer named Steve Baird who was doing research on causes of action in trademark law to deal with this issue and so he wanted to interview me when I was, I think I had just stepped down as Director of National Congress of American Indians, but I was all over the record on this issue for many years and decades. And so he called and he was in Minneapolis and could he come and interview me. So he and his wife came over and we were doing an interview and the first question he asked me was, ‘Why did you reject, ’ because I’d said that we’d met many times. He said, ‘Had you ever considered a lawsuit against the Washington team?’ and I said, ‘Well, yes, but we rejected the civil rights approaches and they didn’t seem quite right for this forum that we knew we would have the hardest row to hoe in pro sports.’ So he said, ‘Well, why did you reject the forum of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Board?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t.’ And he said, ‘Well, did you reject or why did you reject, if you did, the Lanham Act as a cause of action?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ And he was so smart, he explained all of this to me about a pocketbook incentive lawsuit and how the Lanham Act said that you can’t get a trademark license if you have disparaging -- there are four tests -- if you have something that’s derogatory to anyone or anything or if it holds people or thing up to contempt, holds a people or thing up to ridicule or is scandalous and it seemed to me that we fit all of those. It was certainly scandalous to us, but I didn’t know if it was scandalous to general society. So he explained that it would be difficult to have them do it retroactively. What we would have to do is ask them to cancel the licenses, the trademark licenses that the team owners had received in the late ‘60s and, rather than going in the front end to have them not issue the license and that there were complexities in the lawsuit. So by the time he left, I had hired him as my lawyer and then I took a poll of the, I talked to the Board of Morning Star [Institute] and Morning Star became the sponsor for the lawsuit and then I made elaborate lists and called up six people and each one said yes. And the first one I called was Vine Deloria, Jr. and he said, ‘Oh, hell yes. I’m definitely for that.' We’ve got to do something to take this burden on ourselves as the responsible adult population and not have our, not pass this burden on to our children and their children and their children. So that’s why we did it. And his other remark was so much like one of the remarks that had been made at that ‘67 gathering where he said, ‘We have to tell people that this is not acceptable, but we have to say it and we haven’t done enough of that.’ And that was exactly what I had heard and I thought, ‘This is really such a smart man and such a wise elder.’ I think there were many of us who knew Vine was a wise elder before he accepted that he was and he was always very self deprecating. And so we had, I wanted seven people because seven is a really important number for the Cheyennes and we won in ‘99 before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Board. Filed in ‘92, won in ‘99, lost before the federal district court in 2003, and we’ve been on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals since then with one narrow question having been sent back to the lower court about whether latches, the passage of time runs against the youngest of the seven of us who was in diapers at the time that they filed for trademark protection and the Court of Appeals sent that question back with some language that said roughly, ‘There are always going to be Native Americans born and obviously some of them are going to continue to be offended. What about them?’ They were asking themselves and continue to do. So from that I concocted a lawsuit of young people who have no latches problem and again wanted to have it mirror our lawsuit and got seven, but one had to drop out. So it’s now six young Native people between the ages of 18 and 24 so there was no lag or minimal lag between them reaching their maturity and filing the lawsuit. And they filed our same lawsuit, they did that in 2006 and their lawsuit is being held in abeyance pending the outcome of ours."

Ian Record:

"So depending on how they rule on yours, they would proceed with the other one."

Suzan Harjo:

"Then they proceed, right. And it’s a different lawsuit so if they don’t, if the Court of Appeals does not reach the merits whether it’s disparaging or not to us, in our lawsuit then they have to reach it in the next one because they have no loophole, no escape hatch of latches for the Washington football club to get through. So they may escape through that loophole in ours, but they can’t through the next one and that’s just one forum and one cause of action and one tiny group of people. We’ve got a lot of relatives and there are lots of forums and all of that is to say that we’re on the downhill slide on winning this issue and, when you think about it, over 2,000 schools have gone through this process thoroughly and some at length, University of Oklahoma for almost 10 years, some of them really for a long time, before deciding to eliminate their Native references. That’s amazing. That’s really a societal sea change all around the country in the heartland, on the coast, everywhere, big towns, little towns, and almost all of those happened one by one by one except for LA [Los Angeles] Unified School District, they did it as a school district. Dallas-Fort Worth did it for half of Dallas-Fort Worth as a district. Lewisville, Kentucky did it as two counties in one school system. So other than those, though, it’s been done school by school and it’s always the same process and always the same arguments and it’s amazing how you could almost script it and say, ‘This is what’s going to be said. They’re going to say, 'You’re not offended.' You’re going to say, 'You’re not honored.' And that’s going to be the argument.’ And it has been and you almost want to say in the middle of these negotiations, ‘I know you think you’re being original, but we’ve heard it all before.’ Nonetheless, not every argument has been made in every situation and that’s what’s being played out all over America. So we’ve won on that. Whether or not we lose this lawsuit or win this lawsuit, these names are gone, these references are gone."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to wrap up with again getting back to a very general question and really what I’m curious to know from you is what do you see for the future of Indian Country and Native nations?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, "

Ian Record:

"I didn’t say it was a simple question, I just said it was a general one."

Suzan Harjo:

"I was the National Coordinator for the 1992 Alliance, which was from ‘89 to ‘93 really providing Native voices on the occasion of the Columbus Quincentenary, which was 1992 and one of the things that I put in place for October 1992 to kind of wrap everything up was a meeting of 100 wisdom keepers -- all Native people -- wisdom keepers, artists and writers to come together and then I co-chaired that with my old friend Oren Lyons, who’s an Onondaga Chief from the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. And we invited, we just put together a list of our, of the people we most admired and respected and asked them to come. What we were finding was that we knew a lot of different people and that a lot of people, I talked to Vine Deloria for example and he said, ‘Oh, I think that’d be really interesting. I’ve never met, ’ and he named several people. So we put together people mainly so we could just talk about the future and we called it 'Our Visions: The Next 500 Years,' and I will tell you that no one mentioned Columbus at that entire week of meetings and we came out with a wonderful statement, which I will get to you so you can read it into this record called ‘A Statement Toward the Next 500 Years.’ And essentially it says we’re going to be talking our languages, speaking in our languages, we’re going to be the Native people, we’re going to reclaim a lot of our traditions, we’re going to clear out some of the underbrush of stereotypes so our images come through. And it talked a lot about reclamation in a sense and who we were going to be not in relation to anyone else, but as ourselves. And one thing, it was just a marvelous, marvelous thing, and there were all sorts of people there who knocked each other off the charisma meter. Scott Momaday and Vine Deloria and Joy Harjo and it was just an extraordinary group of hundred people, Thomas Banyacya, just amazing, amazing people. And everyone came up with this statement. So that’s how I feel and as the years have gone by there have been so many examples of things that have gone away, things that have been called extinct that are now being revived, which is just, our old people on the Muscogee side say, ‘Never count out anyone, never count out anything because there they will appear again.’ And people all over the place say that about medicine plants that haven’t been seen in a long time and here they are. The teal blue butterfly, which was thought to be extinct for 100 years has reappeared in northern California. And the Pequot language, which, well the Pequots were said to be extinct and then there they were. I know they were there, I was the lead lobbyist on their land claim settlement. And what they have done with their extraordinary wealth through gaming and creating the world’s largest casino, Foxwoods, is they’ve done a lot of good. One of the amazing things they’ve done is to reclaim their language. They know how it sounds. There are lots of Algonquin languages that are spoken today including Cheyenne. No one, everyone thinks we’re from the plains, but we’re not. We’re from up that way. And they, so they know the sound of the language, they know words and there’s vocabulary, a lot of stuff was written down and now they have people speaking it and that’s an amazing thing. Now talk about an act of sovereignty. Here they are doing language reclamation and it really, this is what we in effect envisioned in 1992 when we did our retreat and said, ‘What is it that we want for the next 500 years? We want to be the Native people in the next 500 years and even more so than we are now.’ So this is what’s happening."

Ian Record:

"Well, Suzan, I really appreciate your time. I think a lot of people are going to learn quite a bit from your thoughts and perspectives. We’d like to thank Suzan Harjo for joining on us on this program of Leading Native Nations, a radio series of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us."