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2020 VEEP

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Former vice president and the presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden says he will announce his running mate before Aug. 1. He has said it will be a woman. And a lot of the speculation says it will be a woman of color.
So why not someone from Indian Country?

This is Trahant Reports. 
It’s true that Native Americans are a tiny minority — roughly 2 percent of the population — but Native voters could make a difference in at least six states, four of which Donald Trump won four years ago. (Those four states: Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan a total of 52 electoral votes.)
There is a story here. 
In 2014, a rookie WNBA basketball player, Shoni Schimmel, was on the all-star ballot. She did not even start for her team, the Atlanta Dream, yet she captured the imagination of Indian Country and the voter turnout for that election was amazing. She ended up taking second place, beating far more established WNBA players with name identification. It was a social media election — the ideal landscape for a dedicated Native community. 
Normally a WNBA election would not be relevant to a presidential contest. But think about the landscape in 2020. It’s a pandemic election. Most of the campaign will be on social media, where a dedicated community can make a difference. 
That’s the “why.” What about the who? 
There are three potential running mates that immediately come to mind …
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Nation, is media savvy and the first Native woman to win that office. She has been in the news a lot in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. “As a Native American woman, it is not lost on me that I work in a system that was created, in many ways, to eliminate and erase me … So I’m not interested in just making policy change here and there,” she told NPR; it’s time for systemic change. 
The second Native American who ought to be on any list for vice presidential consideration is Rep. Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo.  She’s a Democrat from New Mexico. What does she bring? She recently told The Albuquerque Journal, “It’s no secret, I know what it is like to live paycheck-to-paycheck. … I know what it is like to piece together health care. I know what it is like to be on food stamps.”
Both Flanagan and Haaland are experienced campaigners who would immediately contribute to a presidential candidate. The third person on my list has campaigned, but her strength is experience in government. That’s Alaska’s former Lt. Governor Val Davidson, Yupik. She is currently the president of Alaska Pacific University.
What she could bring to the White House is the experience of actually running a large government organization, Alaska’s Department of Health and Human Services. She is an expert in health care (including Native health) and can explain in everyday terms why a government spends X on this and not Y on that. 
She could make Medicaid cool again.

 

I am Mark Trahant.

Symbols

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There is now a national debate about mascots and symbols. But let’s be clear: It’s not about statues, flags and monuments … it’s really about the national story. What kind of country is this … and what kind of country should this be?
This is Trahant Reports.

So much has happened in just the past few weeks. And the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers changed everything. 
Debates about symbols that had gone through the slow process, lots of meetings before boards, city councils, even legislatures, and then nothing. 

Then after the nation saw firsthand the injustice of George Floyd and so many others like him, that bureaucratic patience expired. People wanted action.

 

It’s even hard to keep up with the news because it’s happening so fast.

 

In the past few days, President Donald Trump (who does not favor changing the story at all) has called for new federal enforcement powers to protect monuments and statues. He practically looks out his window at Andrew Jackson, one of those statues that almost came down. On Saturday four men were charged with felonies in connection with that act.

 

But the president is in the minority.

 

The Mississippi legislature over the weekend said it’s time to retire the Confederate battle flag from the state flag.

 

And in Orange County, California, there is a new call to rename the airport and remove a statue of its namesake, the actor John Wayne. In the movies Wayne was often the cowboy, Indian killer. In real life he was public about his racism. He told Playboy he believed in white supremacy and said it was not wrong to take this “great country away” from Indians. Wayne said:  “There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly were trying to keep it for themselves.”

 

What’s in a name?
How about the inevitable name change for the Washington NFL team? The owners removed a statue to a team’s founder, George Preston Marshall. He was the last NFL owner to integrate his team and he did so only because he was forced to in 1962. 

Last week a coalition of business sponsors, including Nike and Pepsi, made the case for changing the Washington team name. According to MarketingDaily, sponsorship and spending on the NFL and its 32 teams exceeded $1.47 billion last season.

 

That’s why the name change is a when, not an if. 
So how do these actions change the story of America? We have the draft right in front of us. It’s up to all of us to write chapters that reflect the national story that includes everybody.

 

I am Mark Trahant.

Memorials

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Around the world statues are coming down. Civil War generals. Mass murderers. And Christopher Columbus.

In every case there are far more stone monuments remaining than those removed. A survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found some 1,800 named memorials honoring Confederates.  Add to that union generals. And military leaders from the American Revolution, the Spanish Conquistadors and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

This is Trahant Reports.

One of the most interesting mixes of statues is found on Capitol Hill. There you’ll find Andrew Expletive Deleted Jackson, colonizer Junipero Serra, would-be dictator Huey P. Long and missionary-murder Marcus Whitman) there is also Kamehameha I, Po’Pay, Will Rogers, Sakakawea, Sarah Winnemucca, Standing Bear  Washakie and Sequoyah. 
So at least 4 percent scoundrel (certainly could have added more names to that side of the ledger) and 8 percent Indigenous. 
Let’s play “what if?”  though … Imagine the 20th century and the Native leaders that could be honored on civic plazas, in front of city halls or on university campuses. (Yes, there are a few now, but we are talking numbers. At least 2 percent of all the statues. 
Who’d be on my list? Start with Vine Deloria Jr., Standing Rock. It’s hard to chronicle Vine Deloria in terms of his importance to the country and to Native America. He was a thinker. An architect of change. And, always, a writer. When it comes to honoring the past, in “Custer Died For Your Sins,” he wrote, “Crazy Horse never drafted anyone to follow him. People recognized that what Crazy Horse did was for the best and was for the people … until we can once again produce people like Crazy Horse all the money and help in the world will not save us. It is up to us to write the final chapter of the American Indian upon this continent.”
Deloria could have been writing about himself.
Another name I would include: Lucy Covington, Colville. She was a rancher turned politician who led the fight against the failed policy of termination in the 1960s. Termination was this idea to save money by ending the federal government’s relationship with tribes.  It was a disaster. She would lead a quiet campaign to quiet what she called “the present fever and fervor for termination.”
This list, of course, is not the end. Only the beginning. Because in a country of this size and diversity it makes little sense to cling to statues that honor only a few. There remainsso many richer stories that have yet to be told.
I am Mark Trahant.

Red Summer

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A century ago the United States was finally free from the Great War and dealing with day-to-day waves from a flu pandemic. 
The country was also tested by unresolved questions about racism and violence. 
Tested and largely failed. 
This week marks  the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. 
This is Trahant Reports.

The headlines from summer of 1919 almost seem familiar today. Riots in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and – most dramatically – Chicago. The spark was racial strife.
Even the pandemic, the flu, had a racial framework because hospitals were segregated and African Americans had to seek care at black-owned institutions. 
That era was known as the “Red Summer. There were public murders and lynchings carried out on streets across the country, dismissed as riots. That story conflicted with the story that America was telling the world that the post-World War I-era notion that America was making the world safe for democracy.
And, if the Red Summer was not enough … on May 31, 1921, stirred by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, known as the Black Wall Street, was attacked and demolished. 
“A mob destroyed 35 square blocks of the African American Community during the evening of May 31, through the afternoon of June 1, 1921,” said a report on the event by the state of Oklahoma in 2001. 
Hundreds of whites were deputized and participated in the violence, even providing firearms and ammunition to people, all of them white, who looted, killed and destroyed property. Officials may have blamed African Americans for the “race riot.” But the community and the Red Cross labeled it a massacre from the start. 
No one was ever prosecuted or punished for the violent criminal acts.
Human Rights Watch published a report Friday that called for reparations. Finally. 
“The Tulsa Race Massacre and surrounding events led directly to the loss of hundreds of lives, loss of liberty, substantial personal and business property loss, and damage to objects of cultural significance. Compounding inequalities stemming from the massacre led to lower life expectancy, increased need for mental health services, loss of economic opportunity, and other harms to community members over decades … Yet the victims of the massacre have yet to receive an effective remedy.”
I am Mark Trahant.

Fairness

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The federal government “rushed” payments of $8 billion to help tribal governments navigate the coronavirus pandemic. 
Only rushed isn’t the right word. It’s way more complicated and disappointing than that.

This is Trahant Reports.
By any measure a payment of $8 billion is not enough to mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19 in Indian Country. 
The economy went from, oh, say, 90 miles an hour to 10 miles an hour in an instant. And revenue across the board pretty much stopped flowing in. But on the expense side of the ledger, payroll and other costs of operations, continued to mount. 
Congress basically appropriated the money without parameters, that was left up to the Treasury Department to figure out. 
The first debate centered on whether Alaska Native corporations qualify as “governments” for the purpose of the tribal government relief funds. That question is now in court and 40 percent of the $8 billion are on hold until there is an answer.
Another question is how many people are citizens of tribes? You would think this would be an easy answer. Nope. The Treasury Department came up with its own definition using figures from federal Housing programs. 
A new policy brief by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development 

looks at how that data is producing winners and losers in Indian Country.  The bottom line is that Housing data is “clearly not reflective of tribal citizens or tribal needs,” says the study by researchers Randall K.Q. Akee, Eric C. Henson, Miriam R. Jorgensen and Joseph P. Kalt. The housing formula “produces arbitrary and capricious allocations of CARES Act funds across tribes.”

The better alternative: Use tribal enrollment data. The study said: “the case is strong that an appropriate allocation rule would employ the current tribal enrollment figures submitted by tribes to the Treasury Department in mid‐April.”

Some of that data was leaked and that means there is a public test that can track both the formula and the fairness of that allocation.

And, as the study points out, this creates an “inequity” because some tribes are under-represented in the funding while others come out ahead. This creates “conditions that are ripe for extensive and intensive challenges and even litigation.”

One lesson from the pandemic. Indian Country needs a better way to collect and maintain data. We need a better gauge of what we have and what’s needed. Data is much more than a measurement; it’s a method of setting priorities. 

Then this is not new. Think about how data collection has always been a part of the people’s story. We counted on buffalo robes, on belts, or in carvings. The data always has helped tell a larger story.

 

I am Mark Trahant.

Deloria: Custer Died For Your Sins (Reprise)

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Fifty years ago an unknown writer published an “Indian manifesto.” The book was “Custer Died For Your Sins” by Vine Deloria Jr.

This is Trahant Reports.

Custer Died For Your Sins was a manifesto, a best-seller, and a banned book (a trifecta).

So much literature back then went something like this: Once there was a great chief — say, Chief Joseph — who led his people past danger and outmaneuvered a powerful U.S. Army. But instead of a climactic victory, Chief Joseph almost reached Canada. Almost.

The Nez Perce people almost won. And the American Indian leader was almost great.

Boil it down, story after story, and the condensed version of Native history was reduced to an “almost” narrative.

American Indians were included in America’s master narrative only in the context of failure.

But Custer Died for Your Sins took that old, flat American Indian history and crumpled it until the dimensions were recognizable and honest.

“Most books about Indians cover some abstract and esoteric topic of the last century,” Deloria wrote. “Contemporary books are predominately by whites trying to solve the ‘Indian problem.’ Between the two extremes lives a dynamic people in a social structure of their own to be freed from cultural expression.”

And he freed a lot of cultural expression.

That included the radical idea that “one of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor, life is redefined and accepted.”

Here was a book about American thought, policy, and history that devoted an entire chapter to humor, words that should have destroyed the stereotype of the wooden Indian.

Custer Died For Your Sins was a manifesto — it demanded the right of American Indians to control their image in rich detail. And “manifesto” was precisely the right word — a declaration of principles, policies, and intentions in a political context.

But the book had a dual manifesto: To American Indian readers it was a call to arms, a plea to recognize the essence of tribal philosophy, political systems, and religion.

As Deloria wrote, “There is more to the story than that. Indian people today have a chance to re-create a type of society for themselves, which can defy, mystify, and educate the rest of American society. Yet they mill around like so many cattle, not bringing to the surface the greatness that is in them.”

Looking back over 50 years it’s clear that the most significant contribution of the book was that idea American Indians controlling our narrative, owning our story.

Then it’s not just our story. At a conference last week Haskell Indian Nations University professor Daniel Wildcat said the day will come when Vine Deloria Jr is remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers.

I am Mark Trahant.

Data – What’s the Story?

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The numbers are stark.
Last week Navajo Nation health officials reported six new deaths Friday and 180 new cases of COVID-19. That adds up to 1,590 known coronavirus infections across the Navajo Nation and some 58 deaths.
That topline number places the Navajo Nation at 45 out of 55 states and territories, ahead of ten other jurisdictions. 
What’s the story behind the data? 

This is Trahant Reports.

The state and territory data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention includes three columns: Column A for the state or territory (which should include tribal nations, by the way); the number of confirmed cases; and the number of deaths. But if you insert a new tab, a filter for population, then the story grows even more significant. 
Welcome to the world of the denominator. As one source put it: ‘‘Physicians lie awake at night worrying about numerators. Epidemiologists lie awake at night worrying about the denominators’
As Indian Country Today’s Jourdan Bennett-Begaye reported “denominators are key” to understanding the big picture of COVID-19 in Indian Country.

What population is counted determines our understanding about how widespread the disease is and where it will go next.

Take the Indian Health Service “service population” at 2,562,000. That means the reported infection rate is 0.08 percent. But if you calculate based on the IHS user population of 1.662 million, then the rate is 0.12 percent. 
But that’s only the reported cases. We know this disease can be without symptoms and we don’t have enough testing to know how many people are really infected,
And that will be a much larger number.z
If you use the World Health Organization framework  and the IHS service population that means we will eventually reach 5,778 cases and 275 deaths. 
But numbers again are different if the 2010 Census with the American Indian and Alaska Native population at 5.2 million is used. Then the Indian health system could expect 12,017.2 cases and 572 deaths. 

But all of that changes if a different denominator is used. The problem here is that we know the Census undercounts Indian Country. We don’t know by how many people, though.

This is when that number is absolutely critical.

 

I am Mark Trahant

Fund Litigation

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There are a lot of questions about the disbursement of an $8 billion fund by the federal government to tribes and Alaska Native corporations.
This is Trahant Reports.


The $8 billion tribal relief fund will not last long. More than 600 tribes, corporations, and even nonprofit organizations registered last week with the Treasury Department documenting what’s needed to at least partly mitigate the impact of the coronavirus. 

And based on the leaking of sensitive information, it’s clear the pool will be far short of what’s needed, likely less than ten percent.
There is also no clear indication from the Trump administration about the process. 
Will the release of the funds be public? What formula will be used, population, or land base, or employees? Or all three?
And will even the formula be a public document?
These questions are punctuated by the chaos of an $8 billion disbursement that could happen as soon as Tuesday with a completion date of April 26. 
Several tribes — including two in Alaska — have sued the Treasury Department over the issue of money directed to Alaska Native Corporations. 
The lawsuit says “COVID-19 is causing devastating harm in Indian country” and that Congress recognized the unique hardships on tribal governments. 
The Interior Department said Alaska Native corporations are eligible for the funding, pointing to a definition that includes them as an “Indian Tribe” in the Indian Self Determination Act. 
And most of the tribes arguing against funding Alaska Native corporations argue that money should be used to to support governments with a political relationship with the United States.
The Aleut Community of St. Paul Island says there is a middle ground. “A very workable solution to controversy (is) the authorization by Alaska’s federally recognized tribes for tribal organizations/consortia to receive funding on their behalf, if they so choose,” wrote Amos T. Philemonoff, Sr. in a letter to the Treasury Secretary.
Philemonoff makes the case to let the money flow up, not down. 
However in an op-ed published in Indian Country Today four leaders of Alaska Native corporations had their own take. “The law is clear. Our legal mandate as Alaska Native corporations is to support our Alaska Native communities and shareholders economically, culturally and socially,” they wrote. 
The federal court, like the spending program itself, is on a tight deadline. Once the money begins to flow any legal challenge could be irreversible.

CARES

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The federal government is moving quickly to transfer $8 billion to tribes. So fast in fact that it’s making up the rules as it goes. And it raises a thorny question: Are Alaska Native corporations considered tribes?


This is Trahant Reports.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or the CARES act will transfer $8 billion to tribes not later than 30 days after the enactment of the March 27th law.
So everything is running at hyperspeed.
National Congress of American Indians’ President Fawn Sharp, Quinault, wrote the Secretary of the Treasury Stephen Mnuchin and said the funding should be “distributed to Tribal governments.” However, she said the legislation uses a definition that lumps federally recognized tribes together with for-profit corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
“It is important to note the distinction between Alaska Native tribal villages and ANCSA regional or village corporations,” Sharp wrote. “Alaska Native tribal villages exercise sovereign governmental authority over their lands and citizens, possess a government-to-government relationship with the United States.”
Sharp’s letter was blunt: “These funds will be critical to assist Tribal governments in withstanding the impacts of COVID-19.” 
If the 13 regional Alaska Native Corporations, and the 270 village corporations are included in the fund that would significantly reduce the funding available to 574 federally-recognized tribes, including those in Alaska.
A consultation letter Monday from the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association went even further. 
“Please do not allow Alaska Native Corporations to be counted as Tribal governments under the CARES Act … that would be contrary to the plain language of the CARES Act, and it would allow for double or triple counting of Alaska Natives since members of federally-recognized Alaska Native villages are also shareholders in Alaska Native Regional Corporations and Alaska Native Village Corporations,” wrote Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and chairman of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association.
Alaska Native corporations also have profit-making as their primary mission, not governmental services such as public safety, health, or education. Still, their businesses from telecommunications, fisheries, oil and gas support, to logging have been deeply impacted by the national emergency. 
The CARE Act the single largest investment ever made by the United States in Indian Country–  yet how that money will be spent remains a open question.
I am Mark Trahant.

The New Normal

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The corona virus pandemic is like nothing we have experienced before. The virus is new — and something we humans have no protection against — and so governments around the world including tribal governments are still trying to figure out how to respond.

This is Trahant Reports.

Why don’t people believe? Why the business as usual? And what will it take to change behavior?

Consider this math: California has a model that projects 25 million of its citizens will be infected by the virus over the next 8 weeks. That works out to 62.5 percent of the population.

And if California is a bellwether — as it often is — that means that out of 3 million people some 1.8 million people in Indian Country.

The World Health Organization and the CDC say mild cases account for 75-to-80 percent of the total. This is harsh, but that model means that about 500,000 people in Indian Country will get seriously ill or will die.

“It’s unfortunate that people are not taking this serious. Maybe it would be mass casualties that would really open people’s eyes,” Dean Seneca, executive director of Seneca Scientific Solutions. He told Indian Country Today and worked for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Office for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support for more than 18 years.

Seneca knew the U.S. was going to face a pandemic, and especially when China had more than 20,000 cases.

It is a hard thing to do to shut down everything. No visiting. No shopping. Just sit and wait.

And here’s the thing. We may have to do this for weeks if not months.

In California normally congested freeways are wide open and city streets are mostly empty.

Clearly life is not normal. Yet a lot of people still are living in denial.

Sunday night Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, White Earth, announced on her Instagram page that she lost her brother to the pandemic.

“Almost exactly two months after we buried our dad, my brother Ron passed on Saturday,” she wrote. “To many, he’ll be a statistic: Tennessee’s second COVID-related death. But to me, I’ll remember a loving, older brother, uncle, father, and husband.”

Flanagan said several weeks ago her brother was diagnosed with cancer. “His immune system was compromised and he contracted COVID-19,” she wrote. “He fought as hard as he could but it was simply too much for his body. THIS is why we must #StayHomeMN.”

She wrote that someone feeling well could still be carrying the virus … “then you walk past the next Ron, my big brother, in public.

The new normal. I am Mark Trahant.

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