Pauly Denetclaw
ICT
WASHINGTON — There is a short window between being a youth leader and stepping into an elected position. This is why Native youth say it’s important to be present at the White House Tribal Nations Summit.
This is the first year that the Center for Native American Youth has brought young people but it isn’t the first time youth have been present at the summit.
Sam Schimmel, Siberian Yupik and Kenaitze, was brought to the summit by his tribe and CNAY. He is in law school at Georgetown University. He said the summit has fallen short in a few areas.
“You saw (Wednesday), tribal leaders standing up and saying, ‘You’re saying a lot of things but you’re not doing a lot.’ You’re saying, ‘We respect your treaties,’ but then not actually respecting treaties. You’re saying that, ‘We’re going to come and transition from consultation to consent,’ but you’re not doing that,” Schimmel said.
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Tribal leaders met with federal officials over the two-day summit at the Interior Department. There they heard directly from President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
“I think the wonderful opportunity that’s set forth by summits like these, is that direct interface with cabinet secretaries or under secretaries and staff who are actually able to implement policy changes that tribes need and that tribes want to see happen,” Schimmel said.
(Related: Tribal leaders get Joe Biden’s attention)
Both days of the summit ran in similar formats where participants attended panels that featured both tribal leaders and federal officials. It was brought up time and again during the question and answer portion of the panels that tribal leaders wanted more than just discussions. Participants were a little more vocal Thursday about their critiques of the format and the lack of work being done by federal agencies, like the Interior.
“I think what happens is you bifurcate Indian Country into those who are loud and those who are on the land,” Schimmel said. “And when that happens, the people on the land get forgotten. And it’s places like this, where the people who live in our communities, and people who live in our villages, the people who live on our reservations are able to talk and say, ‘Hey, look, your policies aren’t aligning.’ We do need to electrify. We do need to move away from certain things. But we also need to make sure that our tribes just have basic things.”
The Biden-Harris administration made a number of announcements at the summit including a push for broadband access and other wireless services on tribal lands. A memorandum of understanding was signed between the Interior, U.S. Department of Commerce and the Federal Communications Commission to create a framework that will explore and coordinate how this could be done.
“We talk about broadband internet, in my village you can’t drink the water,” Schimmel said. “That’s a reality across the Indian country. We’re talking about these kind of pie in the sky ideas while real on the ground issues are preventing people from access to healthy food, clean water, electricity, and transportation. And those I think need to be our top priorities.”
(Related: The country’s Indigenous leadership in one room)
Lily Painter, Kiowa and Winnebago, was making a comparison between the White House Tribal Youth Forum on Nov. 14 and the Tribal Nations Summit. It was one of the few times she attended a conference that wasn’t focused on young people. This was a whole different experience from what she is used to.
“It’s a new thing for me, but I really enjoy kind of seeing, what I am going into in the future because a lot of youth who are in spaces like this, you’re preparing them to take on these roles, maybe not necessarily as tribal leaders, but definitely working intergovernmentally, or with tribal leaders,” Painter said. “It’s been challenging in a way but I actually really enjoy the challenge.”
She also noted how the summit had way less engagement opportunities compared to youth conferences where the activities are geared toward facilitating conversations between peers or elected officials. In the future, Painter would like to see more opportunities for people to connect with each other and federal officials.
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“They always say that we are preparing the next generation of leaders,” Painter said. “If you’re preparing the next generation of leaders, those next generations need to be in the spaces with everybody else. They need to be getting the same information. They need to be given an equal chance to know what’s going on in the real world and not just in the youth spaces.”
Isabel Coronado, Muscogee Creek Nation, was on one of the panels with the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murphy to talk about mental health. She got to talk about this important issue but focused on underserved communities like young Indigenous people in the criminal justice and foster care systems. This is an issue that is important to her.
“When they’re involved in these systems, mental health is the last thing to even be discussed,” Coronado said. “Ensuring that they’re accounted for and people are talking about them and thinking about them was very important to me.”
Coronado felt like the elected officials were really listening to her as she spoke about the issue of mental health. Looking forward to the future, she would like to see other Native youth have the opportunity to participate in a panel where they can be heard by federal and tribal leaders at the summit.
“These are really great summits to be at but what happens afterwards?” she wondered. What’s the work and how does that continue after we leave here?”
During the summit, Schimmel liked how available appointed federal officials were to speak one-on-one with Indigenous leaders, some of whom had to travel 18 hours to get to the nation’s capital.
“They threw this big lunch here at the Department of Interior. I’m sitting down with some of our tribal council members and some other tribal leaders from Alaska. One of them looked over at me and they said, ‘Wow, this feels so much like home. The only thing that’s missing is fried bread,’” he said. “I think Secretary Haaland has done a really good job of indigenizing the way our interfaces are happening. The Cabinet Secretaries, the undersecretaries and the policymakers sat down at tables with us and ate food. We sat down and we had lunch. We talked about some of the issues that we’re seeing in our tribes.”
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