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Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT
WASHINGTON — Expectations rise each year for the largest gathering of Indigenous leaders from across the United States. A leader from the Pacific Northwest understands this after more than four decades in his post.
“The first summit was with President (Bill) Clinton back in 1994 when he called the tribes together and said, ‘We need to have a nation-and nation-meeting,’” recalled W. Ron Allen, chairman of Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in Washington state. “And (Clinton) was in the middle of his second term.” Clinton served as president from 1993 to 2001.
It could be debated that former President James Monroe was the first sitting president to invite Indigenous leaders to the White House, according to White House Historical Association. Monroe, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and Benjamin O’Fallen, who was an Indian agent for the Upper Missouri, welcomed 17 representatives from Indigenous nations.
The National Archives has Clinton recorded as the first president to invite tribal leaders to the White House based on a memorandum dated April 29, 1994. He wanted federal agencies to consult with tribal governments. At that time, 322 tribal leaders attended the gathering, according to ICT’s archive.
“I think that had a little bit more symbolism to it and less substance as opposed to substance-focused working summit like this one is,” said Holly Cook Macarro, comparing Clinton’s first gathering to the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit that wrapped up this week. The summit is organized by the White House but held at the Department of Interior. She worked in the White House office of intergovernmental affairs during the Clinton administration in 1997. Cook Macarro is one of the political pundits for the “ICT Newscast with Aliyah Chavez.”
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There was a pause for a bit after the first gathering, Allen said. “We moved into the Bush administration, and it sort of stopped. The relationship was not as strong with the Bush administration.”
But just before George W. Bush, came Mark Van Norman, Cheyenne River Sioux, in 1998.
“So as things move forward there was an interest in promoting economic development for Indian Country because of the terrible unemployment and lack of economic development. So many areas. So many reservations,” Van Norman said, who served as the director and deputy director at the office of tribal justice at the Department of Justice 25 years ago.
The attorney recalled the White House wanting to organize a conference on Indigenous economic development with a group of departments and agencies. He estimated about 1,000 attendees in that 1998 summit, from tribal leaders to big companies like Hyatt hotels and Boeing. The companies highlighted work they were doing with the tribes.
Cook Macarro, Red Lake Band of Ojibwe, helped organize it. They invited every Indigenous nation in the country and held it at the Justice department’s auditorium.
“We had cabinet secretaries calling in the days before, like ‘we want to participate’ and I thought that was remarkable,” she said over the phone from Washington, DC. “We had offices call and say ‘we’re doing this’ and ‘we want tribes to know about it’ or we want to do X or we want to hear from tribes on how we can do better.”
This led Clinton to visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1999 and the Navajo Nation in 2000. (Side note: I was nine years old and in the crowd when he talked to the Navajo people at the Boys and Girls Club in Shiprock, New Mexico.) The first president to visit tribal lands was Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. Roosevelt visited the Cherokee Settlement in North Carolina.
Now the summit evolved with its focus. It’s more structured, she said.
“I thought this year was really extraordinary and thought it went up very well in terms of running the whole thing and trying to strike that balance between hearing from the administration, but also giving tribal leaders the opportunity to speak and engage.”
A small portion of time after each panel this year was devoted to a question-and-answer session from tribal leaders to officials, which leaders took advantage of.
During the substance use and mental health panel on Day Two, Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis brought attention to “a public health emergency that is happening in real time” in Arizona.
“There’s a widespread Medicaid scam resulting in the worst case of fraud in our state’s history, having unlicensed predatory sober living homes, preying upon our tribal members, luring them to these homes and exploiting their addictions in a massive fraud scheme that is resulting in kidnapping, human trafficking and death,” he said. “This is an ongoing humanitarian crisis that needs an all-government approach, including federal agencies to aid the state. The state is unable to address and stop this ongoing exploitation of tribal members in our state of Arizona.”
Breakout sessions, called “nation-to-nation talks” with federal agencies also gave leaders a more intimate setting. The breakouts came out of feedback from leaders in previous years which is an improvement and allowed them to “dive down into the issue,” Allen said. These sessions were closed to the media.
Allen attended the session with the Department of Health and Human Services that the Indian Health Services falls under.
One issue that arose in this conversation with the department’s legal advisors was the concern over “identifying who is a Native American, who is an Indian, what’s the definition of an Indian?”
“And if you get into that conversation, then you start crossing over into are Indians a political entity? Or are we race based? In our view, constitutionally, is that we’re political base, we’re governments, we’re among the family of American government. We can’t let the legal counsel try to redefine who we are,” he said. “So those are the kinds of issues we raise up in some of these breakout sessions.”
While Clinton probably wasn’t the first to invite leaders to the nation’s home, his Executive Order No. 13175, “Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments” issued on Nov. 6, 2000 took effect on Jan. 6, 2000, just days before he left office, and continues to serve as the foundation for the nation-to-nation relationship between the U.S. federal government and Indigenous nations.
“We wanted to have something that was parallel to the executive order on federalism for states. We wanted to have that recognition of tribal governments and sovereignty and self-determination and self-government as a clear directive,” Van Norman said. “And the other administrations have built on it but it’s still relied on.”
The Obama administration implemented the progress report for tribal nations that continues to this day. It outlines the progress the administration has done in a year. The 2023 progress report prepared by the White House Domestic Council runs 81 pages.
Cook Macarro said this may look like a two-day conference with a presidential speech, but “this is much bigger than that.”
Aside from Biden supporting the Haudenosaunee Nationals run for the 2028 Olympics and signing an executive order to create easier access to federal funding and giving flexible usage, the summit is “an administration-wide effort and commitment that drives action that is good for Indian Country.
“Every agency and every department has to show up and talk about whether they’re meeting the requirements for consultations with tribes, whether they’re meeting the requirements and commitments of supporting tribal sovereignty, tribal programs, engagement with tribal leaders in their departments and how they’re doing that,” she said.
Cook Maccaro is a board member of “IndiJ Public Media,” the parent company that owns “ICT” and the “ICT Newscast with Aliyah Chavez.”
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