NEWPORT, R.I. – Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night, nor the fiercest nor’easter to hit the East Coast in recent memory kept hundreds of people from attending the 28th National Indian and Native American Employment and Training Conference that took place during the week of April 15.

Christine Ollis, chief of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Adult Services division and one of the conference presenters, drove through the night with the storm chasing her to get to the annual event, held this year at the Hyatt Regency Newport Hotel and Spa.

”She was wonderful,” said Allison Greene, Cayuga and community development specialist at the Rhode Island Council, which hosted this year’s conference.

”She drove from New Jersey because she was afraid her flight was going to be canceled or delayed. She’s not a Native American and we thought it was so nice that it was so important for her to be here, we gave her a blanket,” Greene said.

The conference brings together hundreds of representatives from 134 American Indian tribes and organizations all over the country that provide job training and placement services under the federal 1998 Workforce Investment Act, and representatives from Labor.

The conference provides a forum for members to address employment issues in Indian country, develop strategies to achieve the members’ goals and get practical training.

”The primary focus of the conference is training to access better learning tools to better serve our community; better recordkeeping, better financial records, writing for success, techniques for difficult clients, and so on, to make the directors and employees who work in the [WIA] program stronger and better at what they do,” said Darrell Waldron, executive director of the Rhode Island Indian Council and chairman of the conference committee. Waldron is Narragansett and Wampanoag.

Equally important are the informal social interactions outside of the presentations.

”Now in the nighttime conversations in the lobby and over lunch, it’s all about tribal issues, federal versus state, urban centers and reservation, federal recognition, casinos versus non-casinos – all those conversations just spinning off all week long and that’s what make the coming together of Native people from all over such a gift because you really get an understanding of what’s going on everywhere,” Waldron said.

Representatives at the conference also elect members of the Native American Employment and Training Council, an advisory council that acts as liaison between the conference organization and the Secretary of Labor.

”They are pretty much our voice to the secretary of Labor, the ones who take up the issues such as funding,” Waldron said.

The conference was a great success, Waldron said.

”We love doing it. Our directors and people leave with a much stronger understanding of the program and its accomplishments,” he said.

Waldron will chair the committee for next year’s conference, which will be hosted by the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin.