Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I'm your host, Ian Record. On today's program I am honored to welcome John "Rocky" Barrett, Chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Chairman Barrett has served as an elected official of his nation since 1971, serving first as vice chairman and then becoming chairman in 1985. During Chairman Barrett's tenure, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation has experienced tremendous growth. With about 2,000 employees, the Potawatomi Nation is the largest employer in the Shawnee area and is a major contributor to the economic well-being of Potawatomi County. He was instrumental in the creation and adoption of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's current constitution and statutes, which have provided the foundations for the nation's extended period of stability and progress. Chairman Barrett, thank you for joining us today."

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Thank you for having me, Ian."

Ian Record:

"Well, I've introduced you, but if you'd please take a minute or so and just introduce yourself."

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Well, as you said, I'm John Barrett, Rocky Barrett. That's a nickname my parents gave me at birth. My Potawatomi name is '[Potawatomi language].' It means ‘he leads them home.' I am a lifelong-almost resident of the area where our tribal headquarters is located, and have been on the Native Nations Institute Board [International Advisory Council] for I guess six years now. But it's an honor to be here. Thank you."

Ian Record:

"Well, thank you. My first question is the same first question that I ask of all of our guests, which is what is Native nation building, what does it entail?"

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"There was an interesting perspective that we heard on...from a number of tribal leaders today. It appears that the... for Native nations in general, that answer is as broad as the spectrum of individual tribal needs and wants, the way the tribes meet the needs of their people and their cultures. There are some commonalities. The common struggle of how we overcame the internal structural deficits that were imposed on us by the constitutional forms that the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, the Indian Reorganization Act gave all of the tribes around the country and the imposition of this quasi-corporate structure and the creation of these council authorities that didn't give a separation of powers -- how we overcame that, how we overcame the opposition of the states in asserting governmental authority and how we've...really how we've overcome the resistance of the free enterprise system in developing our assets have been...I think those are commonalities. The common attributes I think of successful nation building are stable governments, expanded representation, lawful behavior, and something that lends itself to consistent performance. All of those go back to constitutional forms, but they also...those are really accomplished by diminishing nepotism, which is...since everyone is related in an Indian tribe, that is an issue. Financial accountability is a huge one. Separation of powers seems to be a common attribute, and most importantly to make all that fall within a cultural relevance that means something to the culture of the tribe and the people."

Ian Record:

"A tribal leader...a fellow tribal leader of yours once said that the 'best defense of sovereignty is to exercise it effectively.' Can you comment on that statement based on your own experience?"

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"I will never forget the night that F. Browning Pipestem, a fairly famous figure from Oklahoma in promulgating the concept of Indian sovereignty and fighting for the sovereignty rights of Indian tribes, and William Rice, who's an attorney, who's a law professor at the University of Tulsa, gave a speech to our tribal government late one night back in 1983, and it was as if a light bulb went off, because [of] the idea that the exercise of sovereignty is what makes one sovereign. Browning ended up explaining it to several people that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. The business of the exercise of sovereignty...one hears too often this phrase, ‘We don't have to live up to our responsibilities or our contractual responsibilities because we're a sovereign and can't be sued.' Equally balanced with the responsibilities...or the authorities of sovereignty are the responsibilities of sovereignty. Our exercise of sovereignty really was a chain of events, I think, for our tribe and the concept of tribal sovereignty has certainly been interpreted differently in every single tribal environment. Our...the first opposition in my first election as chairman -- because I ran on this concept of tribal sovereignty in 1985 -- my opponent sent a letter to our congressional delegation in Washington saying that we don't want to be sovereign, we're citizens of the United States, which is completely outside of the point and displayed a clear misunderstanding of what sovereignty means or the historical context of pre-constitutional entities that were in place as functional governments before there was the United States and certainly before there was a State of Oklahoma."

Ian Record:

"How can leaders -- you've been through the ringer as a tribal chairman for more than 20 years now -- how can leaders manage the often overwhelming pressures that they face, things like citizen's expectations -- that's kind of the ever-present challenge -- social ills, onrushing events, never enough resources to do everything that you want to do. Then you have the other jurisdictions like the feds, the state, etc., and then you've got this big thing looming ahead of you, which is called the nation's future. How do you...how can leaders manage all those often overwhelming pressures in order to lead effectively?"

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Of course everyone has a style of leadership and certainly every culture demands a certain pattern of behavior. Our tribe has a very unique history, having been relocated three times and then being subjected to a tremendous number of disincentives to stay on the reservation; the 1950s urban relocation program, the effects of the Dust Bowl days in Oklahoma, the fact that the area in which our reservation is located was...in the 1920s and ‘30s was an oil boom area and when the California oil boom happened a number of our people moved west for that purpose. Quite a number of things that caused our current population distribution to happen and leadership...I think leadership can lead to challenges of office and they're both internal and external. The only real way to meet that is by building a competent and professional management structure and then direct it with a clearly articulated plan of action and goals. And then I think any tribal leader, once you get that done, you should use all of the authorities of your office to protect that organization from...what happens with most tribes is that someone comes in whose objective is personal gain, and I think protecting the organization from people who have that agenda rather than the agenda of the greater good of the tribe. The other is to praise those that have a diligent work ethic and most of all I think to persevere in the face of adversity because it's a fairly...it is a constant that you will hear more from those who either have problems or oppose you for a number of other reasons. What's interesting in Indian tribes, the political oppositions are generational. Some of the folks who don't vote for me or don't care for me were folks who did not vote for or care for my two uncles that were tribal chairmen, my grandfather who was on the business committee, my great-grandfather who was the tribal chairman. I think that, unfortunately, there are some of those generational enmities that are there and there are those that believe that during that period of time when we had a very, very small group of people who exerted an undue amount of influence on the tribe's government because of the form of government when we had to govern by meeting in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and all elections and other decisions were made in that meeting, before we extended the absentee ballot privilege and allowed representation in a national legislative forum, that small group of people who exerted an undue amount of influence on the process of the tribe who were deprived of that undue influence, they are the ones who currently oppose whatever progress is being made. Some of that's human nature, it's understandable. I think our tribe in the...we had to make some extraordinary efforts to bring our people back into involvement in the tribal government because we had some extraordinary historical events that dispersed our people and there was a detachment from the tribal culture. We have 27,000 members. Nine thousand, basically, of them, 9,500 are in Oklahoma. The remaining are in eight sort of enclaves around the United States in California, in Kansas and well, here in Arizona there are about 1,500 in this immediate area, where there are these groups of folks who have been two and three generations removed from Oklahoma, bringing them back into the culture and making the tribal government something of value to those people that would make them or make them want to reassert their culture, become a part of it. The tribe has to make itself of value to its people and to accomplish that you have to reach them first. And so this structure of government that we have now and that we have been evolving into since 1985 is unique in that it was...that was required because of this distribution of people of where our membership is located."

Ian Record:

"One of the things I'm drawing from your answer to the last question is this issue of leaders as educators, that a major part of a leader's job is to educate and engage their people to essentially mobilize them, to get their input, to get them engaged in where the nation is heading as a nation."

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Yeah, very much so. I haven't thought of myself as an educator, but as a motivator or of getting someone involved with the tribe. There seem to be two distinct kinds of rewards that our membership seeks: those who don't have physical needs that need health aid or need assistance with housing or education or some other form of assistance. Those are the folks who are most rewarded by the cultural aspect of the tribe, that go to the trouble to learn the language, to learn ceremony, to get their tribal name, to involve themselves in that culture that was a part of their heritage. Our tribe doesn't have a religious elite. Everyone in our tribe is enabled to perform any ceremony that we use because those ceremonies are their individual birthright and so because of that...and we have a long, over 300-year Christian tradition and the tradition of using our traditional ways, particularly a prayer...in our Christian prayers of using [Potawatomi language] and the using of sweet grass and cedar and sage and tobacco in those ceremonies that...those folks that seem to be most rewarded are those that rediscover the culture. The two often go hand in hand, someone who is helped by the tribe financially or physically often at that point is attracted by the culture of the tribe and begins to realize the value of, if nothing else, learning it so they can pass it on to their children. The system of meetings -- that we've been holding now since 1985 -- around the country are half cultural and half the business of the tribe. And watching people's attention in the audience, the cultural things seem to always generate more interest."

Ian Record:

"As I mentioned in the introduction, you first came into elected office in 1971, which is, by coincidence, the year I was born."

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Ouch!"

Ian Record:

"Yeah. But I was curious to learn from you what you wish you knew...what you know now that you wish you knew before you took office in the first place?"

John "Rocky" Barrett:

"Well, hindsight's always 20/20. I think from the perspective of the '70s, the early understanding of...I'd like to say that I had these revelations in '71, '72, '73 of what was going to become of Indian...this was prior to the passage of the Indian Self-Determination Act. I was a 26-year-old vice chairman, my uncle was the chairman and he was -- along with my mother -- was an agency kid. My grandfather was the tribal...I mean, was the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] marshal, the BIA police, and they lived at the agency across the street from where the tribal headquarters was and grew up as 'BIA kids' and my uncle believed, God bless him, but he believed that one could not have a formal meeting of the tribal government without the agency superintendent in attendance and that's what formalized the meeting. And I remember not finding the relevance in having the superintendent there because I had seen a number of instances where the superintendent's interests ran counter to those of the tribe and it was a period of time where...my realization that there was a...the Bureau was asking us to give them advice on the agency budget and then when we would, they would ignore us as far as the advice. And there were, almost at every stop, there was some deliberate statement of policy that the United States government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs job was to represent the interests of individual Indians and not tribes or tribal governments. And that had certainly been manifested almost entirely in the 1948 Indian Claims Commission settlements and it had forced us into a situation of closing our rolls in 1962 except for some arbitrary blood degree cut-off. The concept of blood degree was foreign to our culture and we did away with blood-degree determinations in constitutional amendments in the mid-1980s, but that period of time between '62 and '80 disenfranchised an awful lot of people and led to, on the whole, a great deal of the separation that the people felt from the tribe and its culture. It became all about splitting up this 'poof money' that was coming from the government, these little payments, and less about the fact that here we are a people with its own language and art and history and culture and territory and government that had been there for thousands of years, and suddenly