 He hane wa shte m'kil api, and pe to kin lei shante wa shte, Patrice Kunish, and Mochli Yapie. Good day, all my relatives. I greet you with a good heart. My name is Patrice Kunish, and I'm just so very, very happy to be here with you today. My sincere appreciation to Valerie for this wonderful opportunity to share some of our work and some of our deep thinking around these issues. I have to start off by saying that all of the perspectives and opinions that I'm sharing with you today are those of mine, alone and not necessarily those of the Minneapolis Fed or the Federal Reserve System. I guess I should also start with a comment that while we are here for constructive conversation engagement around race, Native American people and Native tribal nations are not racial designations. And hopefully through the conversation today, we'll be able to distinguish and come away with that it's a political relationship that Native peoples have, Native tribal nations have with the federal government. And that is a particularly important point as we look at some of the most serious legal issues facing Indian country, Indian child welfare. So with that, I also thought I should mention that November has been designated as Native American Heritage Month since 1990. And that's when George H. Bush signed the first proclamation, designating it formally as a national, as a national endeavor. But I've recently learned that presidential proclamation now declares November 2019 as National American History and Founders Month with no reference to indigenous peoples. The proclamation encourages us to study our country's founding documents and explore our unique history. So nevertheless, it's appropriate, I think, that we examine the history of first Americans as Valerie shared with us, our Native Americans, and appreciate the distinctive role in shaping, I think, the moral character of this country. So I think we're all good. Okay. All right. I've got the, this is what I'd like to share with you today. First of all, just an overview of the Center for Indian Country Development. What is it? What does it do? How does it fit into the general scheme of things at the Federal Reserve? Then I'd like to take you through some historical events that have formed and shaped what we see as current economics in Indian Country. And then I want to take us through another conversation showing you some of the real lived experiences that give me hope for resurgence of our Native American peoples. Generally, the mission of the Center is to support the prosperity of Native nations through actionable research and really meaningful community collaboration. So let me just deconstruct that for a minute. Prosperity. We often do not think of the word prosperity in conjunction with Native nations. We think of Native nations oftentimes as being poor or deprived, a lot of despair and trauma. And while that is true, there's enormous amount of growth and progress. And that's where I think we want to really focus the research of the Center in looking for those opportunities to really extend and advance that prosperity. Native nations, oftentimes, you know, we talk about tribes and in the general discourse of the United States, we hear about tribalism. And I just want to make the distinguishing connection here that tribalism used in that way and in the current popular way is really about division and divisiveness. And when we think about Native tribes, we think about community and stewardship and supporting each other. So I just want you to think about that and nations. Nations is the part that defines the tribe's authority as sovereigns. They are political entities predating the U.S. Constitution. They are sovereign governments with the authority to make laws and be ruled by them. So when I say Native nations, I'm really expressing that broader political relationship. And further, the relationship between citizens of the tribe also is a political relationship. And that's the distinguishing point between a race-based conversation and what we see as a political legal relationship. And finally, community collaboration. This has to be based in the community. We have to really appreciate the lived experience and not just extrapolate on a very theoretical, high level. We really want to get into the nitty-gritty. So that's our mission. And this is our development thesis. It really is about supporting the economic development of Indian country. And that includes creating more capital or bringing more capital to Indian country and making efficient use of existing capital. Based on a land-based economy, we often hear economists talk in terms of place-based and people-based. In Indian country, it's both because it is a geographical area. And the people in those geographical territories are absolutely worthy of further inquiry. I say the built economy because we are absent so many types of infrastructure, from banking and financial services, we're either unbanked or underbanked, to just not having schools and grocery stores, things that most typical communities have, that support, that nourishing and thriving community. And then, of course, human capital, and that's jobs, of course, but also creating pipelines from early childhood development with cultural practices, language and culture. So maybe I should stop here a minute and say, how did the Federal Reserve or explain how the Federal Reserve, that in the business of Indian country, the center was established four years ago, four and a half years ago, and I was brought in to be the first director to really blow life into this thing we call the center, using the tools of research and collaboration. I was here in Washington, D.C. at the time. I was an appointee, a political appointee, at the Department of Agriculture, heading up the Rural Development Agency. And before that, I was the Solicitor for Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior. So I really got a good lay of the land in terms of how Washington worked, the different agencies, and the amazing power of federal investments in community. And the Federal Reserve Bank, of course, its main goals are monetary policy, the focus on making sure we have low inflation and full employment. And so in that sphere of full employment and low inflation, we want to look at anything that's dragging or holding back the economy. And in the Ninth District, which represents North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, parts of Wisconsin and Michigan, the American Indian Tribal Nations make up a very large land base and a very significant population as well. So our community development team really had taken a close look and started really working with tribes in the Ninth District around private economy, you know, Secure Transactions Act and supporting entrepreneurship. So the center was created out of this larger, his legacy work of taking a closer look at Indian Country. But we're on a national level, and we want to take a look at Indian Country writ large. So when I say Indian Country, it's really the entire United States. And so when we think about what else we need to bring capital to Indian Country, we also need to recognize, as I said earlier, that tribes are self-governing nations, sovereignty. And so how do we support, in the best way, through research, through engagement, a full commitment to sovereign self-governance? And how do we support that with evidence to help them make good decisions, as well as those other policy makers, be it state or local or obviously federal policy makers, make good decisions? And we need to support that with strong leadership. And oftentimes we think of leadership as our elected leaders. And what we find in Indian Country is that there are layers and layers of leaders. And these are people from the community, our grandmothers and our grandfathers, they're the housing director or the director of child protective services, our tribal court judges. These are our real leaders. So I thought, given this is a Native American Heritage Month, I might share with you a little bit about my history and showing, perhaps, how the economics of Indian Country is intertwined with all of this history. So my heritage goes back to the Shushuste, who is lame, dear, and his time was at a transformational period in the United States. It was the end of Indian people, as they knew it, roaming and living off the land in their aboriginal homelands. So he died in 1877 fighting for the right to remain unrestricted and untethered and unsupervised by the federal government. He was the principal leader of his tribe, and he opposed the treaties of 1851 and 1868. These are the treaties of Fort Laramie that required the Great Sioux Nation to give up much, much of its lands. And here's another word, reservation. Reservation is really the rights of the tribes to retain lands from their original homelands. They reserve the lands for themselves. Oftentimes people have a misconception about what a reservation is, and it certainly is a place. But it was a place that through the land sessions, native peoples were able to retain. So lame, dear, fought the treaties of Fort Laramie that required the Lakota people to see much of their territory. He was present at the 1876 Battle of the Greasy Grass, also known as the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where the combined forces and allied forces dealt an overwhelming defeat to the United States military forces. Well, that set off a whole nother chain of history and the subjugation and trauma of native peoples. He was killed in 1877 when his village was attacked by soldiers under the command of Colonel Nelson Miles, about one mile southwest of the town that's now named for him, lame, dear, Montana. So he married Skuyapi, which means to sweeten. And they had a son named Chenhapi, which means very sugary. And I was at a natural food store the other day, and I saw honey and molasses. And they're all Chenhapi to sweeten. It's also a term of endearment. My grandfather called my mother Chenhapi, the sweet little one. So we have seven, eight generations now of our family descending from lame, dear, and still a very strong tie to land and people and to our history. And so when I mentioned the Great Sun Nation, if you can see the territory in that beige or yellow color was the vastness of the Great Sun Nation all the way to mid-Montana and Wyoming down through Colorado and Kansas over through Iowa and Wisconsin. And the darker swatches are now the smaller reservations. So here we have more reservations and you can see the reservations got smaller and smaller and smaller. This map is really amazing to see just the vast territory that we once occupied, that once gave us food and subsistence. This is another one of my relatives. Her name is Josephine Gates Kelly. She was an amazing woman in so many different ways. She also was a part of history in the making. She's a great aunt. She was born and raised at the Standing Rock Reservation and she attended the Carlisle Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania where she met my uncle and both of them returned to the reservation where she became the first and only woman chief of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. She was a tenacious fighter for her people, especially those living on the reservation. In 1940, Josephine hitched hike to Washington, D.C. because she wanted to meet with President Roosevelt to tell him personally about the conditions on the reservation. And she thought she could convince him to pay attention to the plight of the reservation Indians to add some financial support to lessen the burdens and trials and tribulations. She also fought against the Indian Reorganization Act which forced Native Nations to redefine how they govern themselves. And the federal government created a constitution that said, okay, all tribes, you will now have to form governments along the framework of this cookie cutter constitution. Well, she never met President Roosevelt but she did meet Eleanor Roosevelt a couple of times. And Eleanor was just taken with her strength, her courage, and with her story. And while no specific aide came back to Standing Rock through that visit, Eleanor gave her money to take a train back to South Dakota rather than having to hitch hike back. And she's an amazing historical figure and she recognized the value of culture and community and families. And so I often take a look back to her for strength and courage in and of itself. Yes. Right. Right. So Valerie asks, how did we define the territory of the great Sun Nation? And these are tribes that were both nomadic as well as they had permanent places, permanent villages as well. And when we talk about the great Sun Nation, we have the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. And then we have many, many bands, the Hunkpapa, the Ogallala, the Yanktane, the Sinkangu. And so these different bands occupied the different territory and they knew just sort of where each other's place boundaries and there weren't boundaries per se, but they knew really based upon hunting and fishing and gathering who had a principle or primary sort of take on that land. And there were skirmishes, to be sure, over scarce resources, the introduction of the horse and the bison. I'm going to be telling you about the bison. Certainly there was competition. There was also vast trade networks and I'll share with you about that. But for the most part, they respected this territory. So where the tribal nations ended up on these reservations was really a significant part of their own particular history. But this can be replicated in the Southwest and the Northwest as we saw aboriginal tribal nations really expanding the entire nation. That's a good question. So there's Josephine and she's my inspiration. And so this is South Dakota, I mean Fort Yates, South Dakota. It's the headquarters of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and you may have heard last several years about the No Dappel protests out at Standing Rock, north of Fort Yates, near Cannonball where my family lives. It's a thriving community but still desperately needing to get some real economic lift. My grandfather was born on the Fort Berthold Reservation of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Rikara and then grew up on Standing Rock. And both of those moves were because their homes were taken. Taken for dams, taken for reclamation projects. So it's also a history of displacement. So when I say the Indian country spans the entire country, here's a map of the entire United States and I do want to point out both Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska has a very unique law applying to Alaska Natives. The Alaska Native Settlement Claims Act and while they do not have reservations but for one they do have a network of over 200 Alaska Native villages that have extensive role and responsibility for the well-being of Alaska Native people. Native Hawaiians are not federally recognized per se but we include them and embrace them in the term indigenous peoples, Native Americans. So the rest of the country you can see the big large land-based reservations in the West and obviously that's a function of history. The first encounters on the very east decimated Native peoples through diseases and through land occupation and I just want to point out the blue areas you see down there in Oklahoma right above Texas, Oklahoma is the original Indian territory and that's where the federal government wanted to move all Native Americans in the east. They wanted to move them to Indian territory, Oklahoma. The interesting thing is that while the green regions designate trust lands or federal trust lands or encompassed by the reservations, we have very, very little trust lands in Oklahoma. We consider them Indian country and they are tribal east, they're a statistical area, tribal statistical area but that's the difference that we see with Oklahoma and they do present differently because of that history. Another thing I want to, you can't discern this but within the Navajo Nation which spans the four corners we have the Hopi Reservation so we have nations within nations and let me just point that out. Here is a whole reservation but the land status is different. Okay so let's just, yes sir. Yes and so federal recognition is a political relationship with the federal government. State recognition is a political relationship with the state. Very good question. Good eyes. So who are we? Who are we? Oftentimes I have to say this right off we're an invisible nation. We call ourselves an asterisk nation because we do not appear in many of the statistics about race, ethnicity, and other economic social indicators. It might be an asterisk at the bottom of the graph or we're in this other category. So who are we? Let's bring this out. We are American Indian, Alaskan Native through the U.S. Census. We're 5.2 million strong and a very rapidly growing population. About 60% of American Indians and Alaskan Native live on or near the reservation and we'll talk a little bit about what are the forces that are driving Native people off the reservation. So there's a very strong connection to the homelands. There's also a very strong presence of Native people in urban areas and there's a lot of mobility back and forth like from Minneapolis or Duluth to the tribal nations. We're also a very young population. About a third are less than 18 years and that compares to about 25% of the U.S. population. And then the socioeconomic indicators and Valerie did a really wonderful article about the socioeconomic indicators here at EPI. There is definitely real persistent deep poverty. But we're also seeing some real per capita and household income growth. So we're seeing a very strong emergence of a Native middle class. So let's get into the economics of Indian country. As I mentioned, Native people had a very, very extensive network for trade and commerce. And here's a map that depicts Native American trade routes. And you can see that from the Midwest, all the way to the West, and I would say and argue that it's extensive to the East as well, we were trading, bartering, selling, exchanging through potlatch and other engagements, a really strong network of goods. And those could be goods like furs and peltz, but they could also be things like arrows and other tools and instruments. These social networks also created cohesiveness amongst the people and in exchange of people from one community to a next, through adoption, through marriage, and so forth. So you can see that these extensive trade routes really brought Indian people closer and closer. Here's a Lakota woman. I believe she's from Rosebud. And you can see in her regalia that she is wearing a dentalium shelf. And these are tiny little shells that you only find in the Pacific Northwest. So this shows to me evidence of trade and commerce in exchange. And by the way, she must have been a very wealthy, from a very wealthy family, as you see, not just in her head braids, but her chest mantle as well. Subsistence. When we talk about the Great Sun Nation, the territory really was about subsistence. Where did we go for food? And for the Lakota people, we depended on, and not just the Lakota. It was really all the way from Canada through New Mexico depended on the North American Bison. Over 12,000 years of evidence show that Indigenous peoples had a very intense relationship with the North American Bison that also supported an innovative use and efficient use of the North American Bison for everything related to their subsistence. Plains, tribes, and their trading partners, as we showed earlier, completely consumed and utilized the Bison as a food staple for tools, for clothing, for shelter. It provided them everything. And when buffalo meat was combined with berries and wild rice and other, this was called pemmican. This was the food stuff that carried them through the long, hard winters. It was like a superfood. And now we have the Lower Brule tribe in South Dakota creating tonka bars, trying to replicate. Tonka means big, and tonka bars are sort of the modern iteration of that pemmican that comes from its amazing food staple. We had maps, we tried to figure out where to go, how to go, where's the migration, where's the best hunting grounds, where do we get the corn, the berries, the greens. This is the Black Goose Map of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservations around the turn of the century, 1889 to 1895. And the thing that I love about the Black Goose Map is that it's totally a native perspective. This is not Eurocentric whatsoever. It's about where families live. It's about where the buffalo are. It's about subsistence. You see almost nothing about the non-Indian institutions. It demonstrates a very historical, environmental, agricultural, and cultural knowledge about the land. And this was used to share with others of where to go and when to meet. I mean, it really was both seasonal, intercultural, and so forth. We also had our own currency. And those of you from the east may know that this is a wampum belt of shells, co-hug shells from the Wampanoag tribe. This was very, very, very valuable. And it was very difficult to make. So the value came in from the handicraft of the wampum. And it was an exchange. I mean, we don't think of it necessarily as currency, like dollars and anything like that. But it was a very significant type of currency. It's still used today, informally. And of course, we had our legal systems. This is a longhouse of the Iroquois Confederacy. And I had mentioned about the Reorganization Act earlier that Mayan Josephine protested this cookie cutter constitution, which was foreign, completely foreign to Indian tribes. Most commonly, there would be a council. And the council would talk through the issues. And it was representative of all the families in the community. And consensus was made and certainly consensus through compromise. So the new form of government was really hierarchical rather than distributive. And so that's something that I think we lost when we became formalized into reservations and these IRA constitutions. But if you want to understand poverty and inequality in Indian country, you really need to understand native land loss. And we talked a little bit about that earlier. But it's pretty phenomenal. So I mentioned the Bison, the North American Bison. As many as 30 million North American Bison existed pre-contact. In the late 19th century, the North American Bison was brought to near extinction in just over a few years, less than a decade. And the center research economist Donna Fair has undertaken extensive research to examine the impact of this near extinction of the North American Bison on the indigenous economies and the policies that followed. And from her research, she finds that this near extinction, this rapid slaughter of the North American Bison was arguably the largest economic shock in North America history. The largest, one of the largest economic shocks in recorded North American history. She has a really fantastic working paper published on the CICD webpage, the slaughter of the Bison and reversal of fortunes on the Great Plains. This chart shows how rapid it was. Can you see between the years 1870 and 1880, an unbelievable bloodbath of the Bison. And here is a photo depicting a mountain of the Bison skulls. And sort of the, I think the guy standing on top, you know, it's sort of like, we conquered this, we got this, the land is ours now. And it was so rapid and so shocking. And Donna wanted to see what were these impacts of before and after, and what she found is that native people in the Great Plains who were Bison dependent were strongest. They were the tallest, they were the strongest, and they were long lived. Decades later, generations later, these same people are some of the shortest, the shortest mortality, and some of the greatest health disparities. It's just, as you can see, the reversal of fortune, not just in terms of the ability to live off the land, but the physical impacts are really demonstrable. Donna contends that federal Indian policy that limited the out migration from reservations and restricted employment opportunities to crop based agriculture hampered the ability of Bison reliant societies to adjust in the long run, generating lasting regional disparities associated with other indicators of social dislocation. So again, the history and our heritage is just one dislocation and displacement after the other. Yes. Yes, it was to clear land. Why did they want to clear the Bison? Well, at that time, of course, we had manifest destiny. We had the entitlement of the settlers, the white settlers, to this land, and it was right after the Civil War and the United States really needed to increase and expand industry, industrialization, the economy. So they opened up the land. And to open up the land to railroads and settlers, they needed to clear it. And first, they needed to clear it of Native peoples, and then they needed to clear it of other obstacles, the Bison. And that is a perfect segue into the land loss. And you've heard about the land rush and you've heard about the Lewis and Clark trail and how the West starts in St. Louis. Well, again, it's really a different story. You know, I guess all of this is a different story. The federal government, and this was a collective effort of the executive and the legislative and certainly the judicial branches, set out to acquire the most valuable lands in Indian country, again, breaking up reservations even into smaller pieces, destroying families, and these cultural connections. And one of the main policies to do this, to break up the Indian reservations, to get more land, was what we call the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Act of 1887, which decreed that Indian land was to be further divided into smaller plots and then allocated to individual Native people. My grandfather has an original allotment on the South Dakota side of the Standing Rock Reservation. We still have those lands. They are vital to who we are and where we come from. These two banners or advertisements were both in 1879 and 1911. That gives you a perspective of the land-hungry federal government, land for sale, gold, grand rush that led to a gold rush in California. I was just out in San Diego at the Social Science Association and I was taking a walk down by the marina and I saw a ship and on the ship it said 250 years. California began 250 years ago with the beginning of the gold rush. I'm thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute, Native people were here. California just didn't start Native people were here, but they were very proud of pinpointing the birth of California. And the DAWS Act was a land-eating machine. It's all it did was gobble up much, much more land for the land-hungry government, the railroads, and so forth. So within 50 years, again, another tremendous shock to Native people, the land base. First we had original lands, right? Then we had reservation lands and now we have allotments. And through allotments, the land shrank again from 138 million acres in 1887 to a mere 48 million in 1934. I mean, it was a phenomenon that was just crazy bizarre. And this was lands were acquired through coerced land sales, through foreclosures, through delinquent tax payments, taking the so-called surplus lands after the lands were allotted and often through violence. And we were talking a little bit earlier about the violence we saw in Oklahoma once oil and gas was discovered there. So this really depicts that Native lands were targeted from the very, very beginning. And overall, the history of American Indians really has been one of poverty and substantial underdevelopment. Today, Native lands comprise about 60 million acres, I think more than 60 million acres. We don't have an exact number of acres of trust lands. These are lands that are held by the federal government for the use and benefit of Native people. We say these are our lands, but the legal title to which is held by the federal government. And that's an important issue because while we have land and we have sovereignty over the land, we do not have control over the complex processes that define development and opportunities. And I'll get into that a little bit more. Another economic phenomena is the reeducation of Native people. And I mentioned earlier that my aunt Josephine and uncle Kali attended the Indian boarding school at Carlisle. And here's a picture of three Native kids, wounded yellow robe, Henry Standing Bear, and timber yellow robe. This was before they attended Carlisle, and there's the after. And it was part of this era of reservations and land acquisition that the federal policy turned again. And they said we have to erase the Indianness out of Native people. In fact, Henry Pratt, who started the Carlisle boarding school, said kill the Indians, save the man. So Native people would be taken thousands of miles from their homeland, sometimes as young as three or four years old. They'd be put into a boarding school and immediately stripped of all of their Native clothing. Some of this would be very sacred or spiritual pieces as well. Those would be burned. Their hair would be cut all the way down to their scalp. And then sometimes they would have cuts in their scalp and kerosene would be poured over because the belief is that they were dirty and they were carrying knits and lice. And then they were given hard leather shoes and uniforms and they were forbidden to speak their language. If they spoke Indian, they would be punished severely. My uncle, Calvin, escaped several times from Indians, from Carlisle boarding school. He hated it there, just absolutely hated it there. And Carlisle actually had posses, men with guns on horses to go after the escaped Indians, bringing them back and they were severely punished. And I think he escaped four times and the fourth time he managed never to be found and come back or be brought back. He ended up and found his way back to the reservation, somewhat crippled and a broken man, but he knew he wasn't going to stand stand there. So this happened to thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Native kids. And this is where we find a lot of the worst historical trauma, this intergenerational carrying of this very traumatic experience. Another thing I should mention about the boarding school is that for the first time it brought, I mean, aside from the social connections and the social networks, it forced Native peoples to be together in the same place. And that's where we start to see the emergence of a Pan-Indian movement and that will be important as we see later on. But the boarding school era did not stop until the 70s. So this is the early days, it did not stop. It's one of the most damaging policies of the federal government. And Donna Fair again has taken a look at the institutions of education from a Canadian First Nations perspective. And she finds not surprisingly that Native peoples who survived boarding school, we call it surviving boarding school, actually had stronger, they were healthy because they were fed and oftentimes mothers would give their children up because they were starving and they wanted their children to be fed. But they had an ability to move through two worlds because they knew and understood English. They also had the Indian way about them. Often this created a lot of confusion, who am I? Am I an Indian person or am I a white person? How do I move in and out on these intersections of our society? So Donna's findings suggest that the health interventions actually did have significant impacts on adult health. And those results suggest significant increases in height and body weight. And then of course the substantial changes in their diet made them a lot more resilient to health problems. Yes, sir? Yes. Then the schools opened and it did provide a consistent food source. And when we have consistent food source, we can become stronger, at least physically stronger. But mentally, socially, emotionally, there's still a huge scar. So for us to realize full self-determination and property rights and land reform, it has to be done by the people themselves. It can't be done externally by the federal government. It can't be done by missionaries and charitable organizations. It has to be done within the community. And these community values that promote family relationships and support individual interests can coexist concurrently to advance, I think, the betterment of our tribal nations. So I mentioned about the land situation, right? I mentioned from the Aboriginal territories to the much smaller reservations to the allotted lands. This graph depicts what happens when we see allotted lands being devised from one generation to another. So these are now individual lands that are still restricted. They can't be sold or encumbered without the approval of the federal government. But let's take the original allotty and let's say he has 100 or she has 100 acres. And she devises it or passes it is inherited by three members of her family. So each of those three siblings would acquire a one-third interest. And then they each have three. And so you can see each way along until the fifth generation, that person would have a one-two-hundred forty-third of the original. And when I say we still have our allotted lands in South Dakota, I say that with just relief and pride because I have 13 brothers and sisters. And you can imagine that if my grandfather had five children, so we actually have one-thirteenth of one-fifth of the original allotment. But we were able to preserve that in my niece who's a member of the Standing Rock, citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. So she will have that forever. Yes, that's a fantastic question. Is it heir's property or is it some other way that property is devised or a formal arrangement? My mother gifted her interest to her granddaughter. And that's something we promote because it's easy, very readily done. You don't need lawyers. It's not complicated. You're gifting your interest. And that's the most efficient way to do it. But when the federal government established allotments, they did not consider the inheritance factor. So of course, you can imagine in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Native peoples weren't even considered citizens of the United States. We did not gain citizenship until 1924. So no legal documents really were introduced. It was it was a mess. It was complete and utter mess. And they did not realize the impact of fractionation until the 1940s and 1934. The federal government stopped allotment. And we're trying to regain those particular interests. But it's like bunnies reproducing. You cannot stop this. We're trying to introduce formal legal, like a will, like a gift deed. But it's very, very challenging. And so I think this represents one of the most serious challenges to land use. Let's take a look at this. This is a chart of the number of HUD loans. HUD is, of course, the Housing and Urban Development has an Office of Native American Programs, and they have a program called the HUD 184 Loan Guarantee. And that program is ostensibly synonymous with home ownership. And as you can see in 1994, the 184 program was established, and it was intended to help Native people build homes on the reservations. That's all it was intended to do. And billions of dollars of loan authority were authorized to help Native people build their own homes. And you can see for the first 20 years, the program was flat. The red represents fee land. Fee land is land property that you and I, you know, in the city's own with no encumbrance or restriction on selling it or encumbering it with a mortgage. The black line is trust lands. Those are the Indian lands that the federal government has title to. And the yellow is the allotted lands I was just mentioning. So for the first years, there was no uptake of this program at all. And we're wondering, well, why would that be? Here we have billions of dollars. Why can't we get lending on trust lands? And we find that it's because of these complex bureaucratic processes that everything has to go through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And there's multiple, multiple levels of review, and it has to go through the trust office and the realty office and the probate office. Sometimes it'll take five years to get a leasehold mortgage on trust land. So in 2004, Congress said, okay, we've got to do something about this. We're going to open up the program to fee lands. These are lands designated anywhere and particularly designated off the reservation. Well, lending sort, as you can see, mean just a phenomenal buy-on into this program. So 93% of those HUD loans are now on fee lands, now off the reservation, depriving that economic and community development on the land. So it has this perverse incentive to encourage investment and development off the reservation. We just added a couple years on and we see a big dip at the tail end, as you can see, of lending on general lending. And we're finding that banks have really retreated from Indian country and they've retreated from rural as well. But we're not seeing as many banks participating in the program. And that's a very big concern to us because we need banks to participate. We need a surgeon. And we see a little bit of an uptick on the bottom. We like to think that it's the center really calling this out and trying to get some good action. But here's a program designed for home ownership in Indian country and it's bypassing the reservation. On the flip side, I think this shows something really positive. And that is that there is a demand for home ownership. There's a capacity for home ownership. And when we see the growth in real income, as well as improvement in credit scores, we know that native people are ready and waiting for home ownership to build assets to create this prosperity. This is something that's just come out recently and I presented this a few weeks ago before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. We wanted to know who's lending, where they're lending, who's not lending, and why not? That came from this, you know, that down tick, who's not lending? So what we see over here is the proportion of mortgage loans that are higher price for Native American borrowers. And we looked at this on the reservation and neighboring census tracts. So the blue line at the top represents American Indians and Alaskan natives on reservation lands. These are census tracts that overlay the reservation. The green is nearby, you know, maybe not on the reservation but close by. The black is non-native people on reservation tracts, that's important to know. And the red is non-native on nearby. And what this is telling us is that Native Americans living on reservations who want to buy homes are significantly more likely to have higher priced mortgages. And those mortgage rates have an average of nearly two percentage points higher than for non-native people outside the reservation. And this means that a Native borrower who's lucky enough to get a mortgage on a home for about $140,000 will pay as much as $107,000 more over the course of a 30-year mortgage than a non-native American purchasing that home. And I want you to take a look at the black line. These are non-Indians on reservation tracts, these enormous disparities. So the findings also are coming out that about 30, yes ma'am, now that's not, that's a good question, all good questions why or how are non-natives on reservations? Well remember when I said they allotted the reservations and after the parcels were allotted to all the citizens there was the so-called surplus land that was open for settlement. So non-Indians came pouring on to the reservations and actually got some of the best land for agriculture ranching purposes. So now we have sort of a crazy quilt pattern of land tenure on the reservation and which makes it really crazy for development and jurisdiction purposes. So allotted lands are restricted like trust lands and even these teeny tiny parcels like 110,728 those are restricted lands and it requires an official action. Some of these smallest parcels you know can be eschewed back to the tribe but managing that is enormously expensive. Going back to these findings we find that 30 percent of the loans made to Alaska Natives and American Indians on these reservation properties about 30 percent are related to manufactured housing and of those manufactured housings those rates tend to be the highest rates of all I mean phenomenally more expensive and so looking behind that we find okay so you can't get a land mortgage you know a land-based mortgage we get a leasehold mortgage which requires a lot of Bureau of Indian Affairs involvement let's get a manufactured home that looks like personal property right and so a personal property loan has these phenomenally high interest rates and we're seeing I think that play out in this yes sir yes yes yes yeah we the question is how do tribal courts factor into this how do tribal legal systems factor in to have a mortgage system on the reservation you have to have a foreclosure and eviction law and many of these mortgages are backed up by Fannie Mae and Ginny Mae and Freddie Mack and and and they have to conform to a certain standard you have to have an MOU with the with the with the tribal nation and and and the other question though that you mentioned is about secure transaction act and we really have looked at closely at tribes with secure transaction act you have to have one in place to to have a lending system whether tribes do better with with do tribal economies do better with secure transaction act we don't know that for sure because very few tribes actually have an an act of our operating secure transaction system we don't have a really good filing system is really what it comes down to where where banks and lenders can actually look and see if there's any encumbrances on the land but I want to mention a new finding is that about 60 percent of native borrowers are really impacted by these higher price loans so being a native person in so many respects is a risk factor in and of itself so I wanted to also share with you though the impacts of Indian country economics from an economic mobility perspective we know that every parent would like their child to have a better life than they did right and better often includes this hope that their children are better off financially financially meaning that there's more security and stability and in economic terms this is called intergenerational mobility that what I have built in terms of my wealth I can pass on to my children so I really wanted to take a look at what does opportunity look like for native kids and where is opportunity lacking and what can we do for that so again our research economist Donna fair examined Raj Raj Chetty's opportunity atlas to really see what does Indian country look like and we find a very different landscape for Indian country we call this the slippery staircase that for those of you I'm not an economist I'm a lawyer so those of you who are economists could interpret this you know very very well the blue is the American Indian Alaskan native black is red hispanic they're green and whites are yellow sorry and you can see that the the likelihood of ending up on the bottom for a native american we're at the top of that and look at the look at the other side the the opportunity for for native american people to actually rise up and and end up on the top not very likely so they're the the the complete opposite so Donna fair found three distinct patterns and looking at the the opportunity atlas one is that native kids have the lowest rates of upward mobility even if they came from high income families that's this uh this is the one on the right I mean sorry the left this is um this is the this is the slippery staircase and we say wealthy families it means maybe a family on the reservation where both parents have a job she also found that native women experience the largest disparities in intergenerational mobility and something that I'll show you a little bit later she found this surprising finding and that is that native kids who are raised on or near the reservation these are the census tracts with significant reservation overlap will show greater upward mobility that is where I find the hope and I know some of these seem contradictory but let me let me let me process this a little bit further the data are not perfect there's a lot of noise but I think we see some some strong indication of of some phenomenon so here I want to turn to violence against native women and this is something that's near to almost every single family in Indian country violence against native women trafficking of native women missing murdered indigenous women movement that has come out of I think the VAWA efforts violence against women but according to our department of justice four out of five native women are impacted by violence and this could be sexual violence this could be physical violence violence of some sort we're surrounded and viewed by violence and native women face murder rates more than 10 times the national average the center for disease control looking at homicide find that homicide is the third leading cause of death among native women ages 10 to 24 that is really really scary the crime the national crime victimization survey finds that native women are more likely to sustain injuries and require medical care from an assault compared to white African American and Asian women it is part of this violence that has started with the slaughter of the bison and it continues today I have a sister who is a state legislator in Minnesota who carried the bill that became law that created a task force to study this the murdered the missing native women and we don't even have the good data to say are these data correct and accurate are they up to date who's responsible the jurisdictionally for public safety so it's a it's a blight it's it's it's it's just absolutely tragic but turning the page I want to talk now about self-governance and self-determination and resurgence because the landscape of history the landscape of opportunity the disparities that we're finding are part of the story the other part is a part of strength and courage and resilience and certainly persistence we've seen how institutions and historic events and political and societal events have been a conduit for persistent effects on the economic development of Indian country but since the 1980s and I think this really has come out of the the civil rights movement this is where we see the pan-Indian coalitions forming around the national congress for American Indians the Native American Rights Fund where I started my legal career looking to enforce the treaty rights and legal obligations the trust responsibilities of the federal government as well as trying to figure out okay we got to do this for ourselves how are we going to do that and much of this resurgence has been attributed to to leadership and informal leadership more than anything so this is the same map I was showing you earlier about that HUD 184 that's the loan program that's completely bypassing Indian country but I wanted to know well where are loans being made and how are they being made so I plotted this map to show me tribes and communities that are doing well both in terms of the number of mortgages to their citizens and those that are actually getting it done on trust lands and what we find over to the far right is that the flathead reservation which is home to the confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes are pretty amazing that they have done both high number of loans and a high percentage of those loans on their trust lands we see that the Unite of Wisconsin are doing well we see the eastern band of Cherokee and we see a lot of other activity on the getting the volume of loans up to me this shows strong leadership and in going further we find that that leadership is creating institutions like the model tribal secure transaction code like tribal courts they're establishing financial institutions native tribal owned banks and native credit unions and native CDFIs that are filling in the gaps where we see traditional lenders that have retreated from the market they're not only bringing capital to Indian country they're supporting financial education and credit rebuilding and just getting native people familiar with this is the system and this is how you got to work it these are the processes that had been very foreign and unknown to us before we're actually doing a really neat research project now with the two tribes in Wisconsin we have one tribe that owns a bank the Unite nation of Wisconsin owns a bank in Green Bay Wisconsin it's called Bay Bank and they want to open up a branch of that bank in another native nation's community this community has never had a bank or financial institution it's the only county in Wisconsin that doesn't have any sort of financial institution so we're at the very beginning to see what is the uptake of the new community to financial services what kind of community engagement and and how will these banking services be used it actually is really quite exciting gaming I'm sure that was on your mind from the very beginning I was in house council with to the Mashantucket Pequot tribe since the early 1990s and the Pequot tribe owns Fox Woods Resort casino in Connecticut it was one of the first casinos that had amazing growth and and and really set I think the standard both for the style and design of casinos but also the interactions with the state and local governments in terms of revenue sharing so as you can see in the early 1990s revenue was fairly low by the way these are in billions of dollars and so now you see 2017 I added on 32 billion dollars and a lot of this money I would say 97 cents on every dollar is spent off the reservation 97 cents on the dollar is spent off the reservation but what I wanted to to share with you is the positive impact of Indian gaming in the increase of per capita income and there's a wonderful study by economist Randi Aki on the eastern band of Cherokee and if you go back here you see that they're one of the tribes that are doing really well both in homeownership and on on their tribal lands and Randi wanted to take a look at how the eastern band of Cherokee distributed their income through per capita payments and what would be the impact in their community right this was part of the these were outcomes that were measured from the Great Smoky Mountain Survey some of you may be familiar with that and and those research researchers looked at both sort of the clinically validated DSM measures for emotional and behavioral symptoms as well as sort of other things that indicated social progress or or decline and the finding was this that a family income boost of a very modest income four thousand dollars resulted in significant and large improvements overall so these are per capita payments or a distribution of the gaming revenue and for the eastern band they distributed four thousand dollars to every family and Randi found significant and large improvements and this included children's educational attainment like graduation rates this amounted to a decrease in encounters with the criminal system like juvenile the juvenile detention and adult criminal justice system behavioral and emotional health as well as surprisingly to me civic engagement more community members engaged in voting engaged in committees they participated in supporting the overall governance of the community and we see this in these two charts I'm hoping you can see the top is the coefficients on American Indians by way for social behavioral disorders and the bottom trends looks at these coefficients on Native Americans by way for conscientiousness and you see on the top graph it goes down the social disorders are decreasing while conscientiousness is going up and you know these two key personality traits I find actually quite fascinating because conscientiousness is really about people who are not who are telling the truth who are socially engaged they follow the rules they pay attention we're seeing a really positive upswing unconsciousness agreeableness and the ability to socialize it's the comfort level of being with people and around people that's that civic engagement and so we have to ask ourselves how does money help we find that money helps some of the most vulnerable people in some of the most significant ways but how does money help right and who does it help and so we really find that income intervention especially with parents who are really struggling can improve overall family conditions it improves their their their mood it lowers their stress it allows them to maybe engage in conflict with less strife we see the income has the big the income boost has the biggest impact on children who started off with the greatest problems we just don't know exactly the long-term impact on this but parents have said that this extra income boost really gave them the ability to just to just survive not to struggle and and not to be stressed out about how i'm going to buy diapers or fill my uh my car with gas or pay a cell phone bill or the utility bill these less stressed parents made better decisions were able to engage with their children yes yes so this is this is um this is consistent this is consistent additional income sort of like the earned income tax credit that i received like oh my gosh this was uh such a phenomenal um program yes predicted regularly and that you knew about it mm-hmm and these were modest again there are some other per capita distributions that are quite substantial and some others that are quite low or some tribal leaders are saying we're not going to give percapitas we're going to put our funds into education or child welfare what whatever sort of computation but it's an investment in the community conditional meaning the the improvements oh these payments i'm sorry yes these payments were unconditional no and i think that's a really good question because oftentimes we think of um income distributions requiring a work component right i think that's what you're you might be getting at and and and we find in native communities and the native communities that i've worked in that the deficits are so so deep that it's going to take a long time even to get parity with the norm right um so these are non conditional payments yes of course no no this is a this is a conversation that we've started recently on wealth in indian country and i reason i moderated a panel conversation at a recent conference of the native american financial officers association and we had tribal leaders of from three different tribes and uh i wanted to know what does wealth look like to them and one tribal community does give out very generous per capita payments another tribal community said we are not giving out per capita payments and then still another tribal community said we're struggling but we're going to acquire this land at a premium because of its cultural historical ties to one of our our great leaders standing there so each tribe has has a has a different um model of distributing capital and supporting the community did i answer your question the results from this study only looked at the um at the income support yeah but we're interested i guess maybe that's where i was injecting myself we're interested in looking at other models as well and the overall impacts yeah thank you so remember i told you about the that third finding uh from our intergenerational mobility and i said that um the kids were really the kids who grew up on or near the reservation or showed the the the more upward mobility that's this chart or this graph in the data tells us that we may not be correlations that these native kids are actually demonstrating more or greater upward mobility and likely to reach the top income distribution so this is where i really want to examine what is going on here is it education is it having a stable home is it having a higher price job what is it that's raising uh raising uh the spectrum of upward mobility it reminds me also and mind you these are kids that are growing up on or near the reservation which i also would find a little incongruent because of these other factors that we had talked about so what i think and what i'm exploring further is that maybe reservations are not the commonly charged negative predictors of economic outcomes this is where i think we need to focus a lot of our time and attention and going back to indigenous women and violence against women i wanted to show you this because we are taking we are taking a close look we are taking this into our own hands and i think that's the real determinant of of of our survival is that uh it's a ribbon skirt and if you know native native culture it's a form of uh cultural and traditional clothing that represents the sacredness the sacredness of the american indian and native uh how um native women everywhere i won't want to distinguish indigenous women everywhere the deep connection we feel to our to our bodies and to the spirits that we have this connection to our land and so with the murdered missing indigenous women's um task forces that are being created across the country and certainly i think on a national level we are going to expose we are going to shine a light on this and we are really going to take a strong take it back for native women and i think the hardest thing for any woman who's been a victim of violence and certainly sexual violence is sharing your stories and this is where i'm finding the strongest and the most courageous women are showing up and telling their stories of of of just atrocious acts committed against them against their mothers and their grandmothers and their aunts and their daughters so this to me gives us hope that we need good data it's a mess right now and we see institutions are not talking to each other we see jurisdictions not talking to each other we can't get a grip on this until we know exactly what's going on and i just mentioned two more things here we did a recent study of police stops in minneapolis one of our research assistants did a study and they thought they were going to see a lot of encounters with with black people with black males in particular but what she found was that grossly disproportionately the most significant encounters with minneapolis police for stops of suspicious persons or native women and we have no idea why that would be that way so data matters what do the numbers mean are they to be trusted are they reliable how do you identify as a native woman what does suspicious look like i mean these are telling us not just high mortality rates but encounters that are pretty alarming so i throw this out to the world to all of you how can we support indigenous economic resurgence and sometimes i think of the word insurgence you know we need to create a we need to react we need to respond and we need to do it in a in a really really big way i think it's a question that really that that all of us are responsible for even though we are a small part a small percentage of the us population i want to say that we're a very significant part of our heritage our economy going back to the gaming conversation did you know that american indian tribes are the 13th largest employer in the united states collectively over 700 000 employees and these employees have benefits they have health benefits they have 401k and if you think about where indian country is going back to the map and rural communities i think there's a huge opportunity to to combine indian country resurgence and and and rural economic development so certainly education conversations like this are really important we have to continue the research we absolutely have to dig in and and and get more data more reliable data and the policy advocacy that all of you have in within europe powers and we need to support governance improvement and i don't say that lightly and and it's governance on all levels because certainly native governance needs to significantly improve both the empowerment and the ability to control our destinies our resources going back to that buffalo that strong buffalo uh bison dependent uh reliant society but also federal government which is uh just a bureaucratic mess when it comes to native people i said earlier that we have sovereignty over the land over our people but we don't have control over these processes we've got to get some control and we need to as users as end users and and and stakeholders we need to we need to push for these reforms and certainly the governance improvement has to come from within but the federal government has an overarching trust responsibility that cannot be that cannot be disregarded and so i want to say in Lakota Paloma Yaye which means thank you and if i'd say Paloma Yaye Tonka i would say thank you very much i appreciate your time and attention that's a really good question and and something that we've been talking about lately internally uh reparations for american indians and this is in the context of a lot of other conversations going on uh for reparations for african americans descendants of slaves and so forth and in the context of um american indians alaskan natives native hawaiians uh reparations is a really important conversation and oftentimes when we think of reparations for what harm and you had started with the bison so that's what i was connecting the connecting the dots reparations for american indians and alaskan natives for indigenous people is is really wound up in this political history because there has been the the takings of the land the taking of sort of the identity the the boarding schools the taking of the economy and and the subsistence what we have found and and this is really i think remarkable is that the work of american indians through the legal system especially as i was saying earlier the the native american rights fund started in the early 70s coming out of the civil rights movement to try to enforce those those treaties as the highest law of the land these are legal obligations and um and that was firmly establishing the different rights legal rights one to exist one to have standing in the court and one to actually get compensation for that lat loss so for example the the uh us supreme court has said that the united states can take any land it wants from an american indian native american community the condition though is that it has to pay for those lands it has to give due compensation or just compensation so usually you don't have the right to take anybody's land uh but uh the federal government through the supreme court has that right uh and and this is a real life issue per currently unsolvable in that um the united states took the black hills you know i showed you the map of indian country of the great su nation and one of the reasons why they wanted all that land is because there was gold in the black hills pahasappa and and pahasappa is very sacred place to us and uh the case went all the way to the supreme court and found that yes the government has this right to take the lands it has to compensate well i think eight billion dollars was put aside to compensate the su nation for these lands and this was back in the i'm not sure the seventies for example the native peoples have said we don't want that money we do not want that money we want our land and not only do we not want the land and not for the resources to exploit but it's a sacred place for us and and so reparations for native american people for indigenous people means a lot of different things we would like to for example stop the the denigrating mascots you know that would be a really big step forward is that a reparation well maybe stopping an injury feels like it would be but is there compensation involved not necessarily it's it's an acknowledgment or a recognition that these are harmful activities and they continue to be harmful um on reparations that have financial you know compensation uh many tribes have been keeping uh have had persisting in in trying to enforce the trust responsibility against the federal government so you may have heard about the cobell land claim elouise cobell and and this is just a short story i was a a new attorney at the native american rights fund when the board of directors uh was considering the question of whether or not we should file claim against the federal government for mismanagement of the trust resources and the trust resources are generally any funds that are derived from the trust lands from the reservations and that could be leasing for grazing and ranching purposes it could be extracting minerals it could be any use for which uh income is derived and all of those are put into a trust account my mother had what they called an iim account an individual indian money account and lot in lands would be leased out and those monies would be collected and then a check would be uh sent to my mother and we always look forward to those checks around school time for new shoes or christmas time or sometimes it was a turkey for Thanksgiving but those monies had been grossly and and and consistently mismanaged and and billions and billions of dollars lost so the board of directors hired consultants through the big audit firms arthur anderson and such and all of these big audit firms said don't do this it's just a mess there's no accounting possible of all of the loss either of all the accounts or the loss of the land or of the funds and so forth well the board of directors said we have to do this this is much a legal imperative as a moral imperative as it is a legal imperative so fast forward almost 25 years later and i find myself in this solicitor's office at the department of the interior and we're finally settling those cobell claims and the sad thing is is the good thing is that the claims were settled once and for all the sad thing and the controversial thing continues to be that they were settled on pennies on the dollar so you had the gross mismanagement with a enormous loss and then you have further and further cuts so when we try to quantify what that loss looks like it's so complicated and sometimes it's not about the money it's about finding the the moral the moral right yeah and so reparations in the american indian community looks very different but it is part of the conversation especially as we see urban indians being treated very very very differently and sub substandardly yes sir yes yes yes yes yes fantastic question and and that's why we have a mother and a child because i think all of our hope is for the next generation for the children and the first convening that we had that i said we were going to start our work around was early childhood development in indian country and this is another story that sort of illustrates these institutional i don't know angst around native issues so i wanted to i wanted early childhood because the focus has got to be on the children and i wanted it to be i wanted to start with trauma historical trauma you know the boarding school and the indian child removal and and all of this and uh my colleagues at the time were saying oh that's that that just feels really uncomfortable that we would talk about trauma and i and i said well what where would we start they said well let's talk about brain development and sort of the science of brain development and i said we don't get to brain development until we talk about trauma and i said and we have native american scholars my cousin joce gates and dr maria yellow horse braveheart who are phenomenal scholars on historical trauma i said we have to start with trauma then we can talk about brain science and how that impacts um uh early childhood development and then i said uh this is continuing the story i said and we're going to start with a drum and they said a drum a drum in the well it'll be so noisy we'll disturb people i said well great let's make some noise let's disturb people and i said and then we're going to have a prayer we always start out with a prayer and oh we don't pray here you know we're non secular i said in the indian way we this is the way we start so i i think these are institutional ways to to to to to understand not just culture but the approach to the work um so yes i'd like to show you something on here we then created a wonderful collaboration with uh the uh kc family programs and uh a local tribe the Shakopee-Midwakanton Sioux tribe around healthy children healthy nations and we really looked at um at uh how many how many programs that sort of the composition of the programs how do we define teachers because we have a lot of traditional teachers we find that language is probably one of the most important factors for children's later uh uh development and the way we we look at that is in the sense of um learning another language is about especially indian language it's very cultural it's very very um based on on on on on identity so we believe that language and quality education combined provides the best opportunity for resilience in later life and we do have some studies on that that's a great great question thanks yes so distrust is sort of this big umbrella that uh that holds a lot of institutional angst and again i i trace it back in terms of history and and then the reaction to history so in the boarding school era the way kids were rounded up is um they either would come to the door and say i'm taking your child we're going to educate your child but they never said and you'll never see your child again for seven years one day your child was was just gone or they'd come uh the bi agent would come and say we're taking all your kids to the dentist the is a health checkup and the bus would never return and the kids would be sent off to boarding schools or um it would be as you had mentioned who's going to protect me right and uh if you're a native person on a reservation it's generally the tribe and the federal government that are responsible for public safety and the federal government has jurisdiction over major crimes the tribe has jurisdiction over everything else but if you're on the uh pine ridge reservation or the navajo reservation as you saw that vast territory what is the responsiveness of that fbi agent to a missing woman call or a murder um there was a um a really amazing film this past year or so called wind river you may have seen it and and and that is uh wind river is a reservation in wyoming and it's home to two reservations but it it really showed the the the mess the complexity of who's in charge are they responsive or not and will there ever be an investigation will there ever be a prosecution will there ever be uh a sentencing and so it starts from this very beginning of distrust as you said because we think the the incidents of violence are enormously under reported and then who do you send that report who do you call right do you call the tribe do you call the county do you call the state do you call the fbi it isn't clear and um and and and even tribes that have uh law enforcement agreements with state and local or um or the fbi there just isn't the resources to pursue investigation of every incident several years back the department of justice actually funded a surge of law enforcement activities at the standing rock reservation which i really was keenly interested given my my family connections there and they found that indeed with additional law enforcement crimes were reduced substantially the incidents of crimes and those that had been committed that were investigated actually were prosecuted and that itself was a deterrent to crime so the importance of having a law enforcement presence cannot be understated um and then but trust permeates distrust permeates every institution from education to health care um to law enforcement okay so i have a mouse here and this uh this is our home page i just want to show you we have a resources button up here i'm not going to be able to get it and then uh all of our events and i and speeches which i think are really valuable content in themselves just because a lot of the power points and materials are there oh okay sure open up resources well i'm just going to scroll down here if you don't mind so one of the big things we've been focusing on is uh home ownership and i i showed you a little bit this morning this button it's this tab itself is um a handbook that that collectively the native the national native american home ownership coalition that i established created this handbook and it really is to unravel this very complicated mortgage lending system it's pretty fantastic it's chock full of research and resources in itself case studies again it was a collaborative uh undertaking and here it is um we really wrote it for uh tribal leaders because they themselves that we don't understand home ownership please help us understand how this works what we find though is that banks and lenders and federal agencies really love this resource because it shows um uh let me go see if i can get into it this is the pdf version but it um it shows um how we do home ownership we have case studies for example a large tribal subdivision in new mexico we talk about alaska we talk about the partners that are needed to support home ownership especially as we said credit building and repairing credit scores becoming home by your ready we need to understand the community needs and here i want to tell you about an amazing uh leader in the community sharon vogal on the shayan sue reservation in south dakota she's creating she's building 400 units on the reservation and it's taken her at least 10 years to come to this point where she's actually um helping people move into their homes uh this is a this is a study and i think there's a um a video this is the salish and kutney a tribe that i was telling you about on the flathead reservation in montana we wanted to know why and how they were creating home ownership opportunities and uh it it comes down to not one guy but one guy named jason adams who assembled a team and connected to the the bank and said we're all going to do this together and all of the tribal leadership said home ownership is a priority and we're going to go through the program itself so we really took a look at the lending processes and this became really the subject of our testimony my testimony before the the u.s. senate one thing i wanted to show you is our work on manufactured housing so fanny may and freddy mac have a duty to serve obligation and it includes american indians rural and manufactured housing once we took a look at the humda data the home mortgage disclosure act data we found just so many remarkable findings you know one of which was this enormous concentration of lenders two lenders particularly um that are accountable for these high cost loans in indian country so there's a concentration of market there's this enormously high price of lending and uh we've done some subsequent work on manufactured housing so getting back see if i can do this okay um let's let me show you the resources page there we go it doesn't look very pretty but i i want to show you that um we've got mapping native financial institutions we have reservation profiles so for any reservation over 2500 or is it 1500 you can get in and look at the demographics but we also loaded it with housing humda data and broadband data broadband has become enormously important not just for economic development but for telemedicine and distance learning so what i want to show you because this is super fun at least for me is our mapping of native american institutions where is it right here right there i call these i've designated this term nafis uh native american financial institutions i wanted to know who is serving indian country right all right i need some help in this clear this mouse so when we saw that there was a huge retreat post recession of conventional lenders from indian country i really wanted to make uh i wanted to know who is serving indian country and what i found was absolutely revealing and so i said okay let's put this on a map and really take a good look at it so i'm calling the collection of banks native owned banks a native owns credit unions and cdf i funds as nafis now native american financial institutions and i wanted to know where they were located i wanted to know their size in terms of assets and liabilities i wanted to see if they're combined cdf i funds along with banks so here this big and so as you hover over each one this is f and m bank it's in oklahoma it's one of the biggest banks that there is and oklahoma as we mentioned earlier does not have a lot of trust land so it's a whole lot easier to lend both commercially residentially and of course for economic development with the with the uh the tribe here this is a tegua community development corporation it's very very tiny but even that it exists is sort of a really remarkable marker as well i wanted to point out this is the cook inlet lending center it's a cdf i fund and again it has it has a big footprint you can see by the size of the circle it's a really big big footprint and a big impact this is tongas federal credit union and tongas is not necessarily a native owned credit union but it serves the native population in such innovative ways they have micro centers dotted along their territory and they're doing that you know to a cost to support the community needs ok this big giant purple dot in ok colorado is the native american bank tribes 20 years ago got together 30 years ago and said we need a bank that provides us our own capital for the big lending deals for casinos or what have you and then um i love this one the Lakota federal credit union it's on the pine ridge reservation and one of the hardest places to get any traction is pine ridge well Lakota branch or tani branch i should say at Lakota funds is just doing phenomenal work she has Lakota funds and she has a credit union and she's making loans to vet turns she is turning around um light tech properties into home ownership she is absolutely awesome and then over here uh this big blue dot as i mentioned um where's the uh salish and kutney eagle bank that's the that's the flathead reservation i was showing you so there's a lot of information you can get both uh you know on the particular institution but you can go down here and get a whole lot more in terms of the asset and liability statement and we're updating this every year to really show where their strength and where there's synergy and and we know that tribes want to make a deal we've got bay bank over here in wisconsin as i was telling you earlier um that's going to be opening up a a branch on another reservation so that is enormously exciting so the the nafis so you can look and see we have about our data what includes um i was recently at the cdf i fund as well as the ncu a and all of them are really super excited about the possibility of growing our nafi footprint so let's go to the uh reservation profiles and this was created by my colleague uh dick todd and we wanted to explore again um in a big way the economic indicators of the reservations and so you can again we wanted to put all the data out there for folks to take a look at find a reservation so let's see if i can do this and let's look at the hopi reservation so as we scroll down we can see uh groups by population this is um american indians and alaskan native alone and then in combination uh these are us census terms obviously and we see that it's a very large community over 9 000 of which um median age is again a very young population i believe and then what i like to see here is this demographic pyramid because when tribes are trying to figure out where to allocate funds and they need to understand where the demands or the needs are right i look at the demographic demographics excuse me and i see for example a very strong young population that tells me invest in children invest in job force training that invest in housing for those communities we can look at education attainment and here's the broadband and something about broadband it says here in hopi if you can see this can't see this in the back it says that uh about 29 percent of households on the hopi reservation have broadband you know there are two different ways of understanding broadband one is if it's available to you i think that might be the FCC a way of looking at it the other is if you have the ability to actually hook up to it and that i think is the most important indicator because it tells you you have enough money to actually get on to the system so this is a very very low number apparently the united states were well over 78 percent uh reservation wise it's only about 58 percent of reservations that have access to broadband so remember i told you earlier that hopi was a nation within a nation is completely within the the navajo reservation so there's an there's an infrastructure need for for sure we yeah some of these are say again we're getting a lot of different information that we've amalgamated here yeah so it is by household and um it is acs american community survey and we're breaking it down but we're also layering on other information you know um like the broadband like the humda data and so forth so i was going to show just an example of this is something that my my colleague dictata has really studied is where do we find income by source and we find in indian country uh a good part of it is uh self-employed well this doesn't show it much uh this is wages and salary here's the united states here's uh this particular community the hopi community this is self-employment this is interest and dividends social security you can see um public assistance and we're trying to map this to the relative to the to the um uh to the united states the type of income i wish say self-employment tends to be high we look at poverty rates we look at home ownership this is really remarkable and this is what i wanted to show you is it shows suggests that there's like a 73 percent home ownership rate on the hopi reservation now home ownership might mean something different to a hopi than to you and i this home or this hogan may have been inherited from many generations they would consider that home ownership whereas you and i might consider home ownership something acquired through a mortgage so this is remarkably high and i i think it's an indication of sort of the the particular aspects of that community and here this is what i wanted to show you uh something we we just added last year with the home loans through the honda uh the public reporting and these are sort of the census tracks we try to figure out the census tracks and the reservation boundaries and then to take a closer look in terms of where there was lending right and what we find here is that there isn't any lending right right right right and then when we do look at and and this is where some of the manufactured housing comes into place is what kind of loans are they going for what's the denial rate so this i think is really useful we're going to expand the the number of reservations that are part of this to smaller population sizes it takes more more time obviously to get all that granular data i wanted to show you um you had mentioned the model tribal secure transaction act so this isn't really fun or exciting but we do have a substantial amount of information about this model of a secure transaction act we were actually part of revising the model tribal secure transaction act last year so all of that in the implementation guide are here and we've been trying to study along with the native nations institute the uptake of a secure transaction act and that's very very hard to find but this should give some good information over here how much time do we have i don't want to take up too much of your time more of your time um we have a quite a bit of working quite a few working papers and so this is where i wanted to show you many of you are researchers your your policy wonks the higher price of mortgages we talk about the boarding schools or the residential schools we're looking at the value of humda coverage i i wanted to talk about children you know you mentioned that earlier this is where we're finding a lot where this is where we're putting a lot of our resources our research resources so donna here's the slaughter of the bison paper and she's actually making all this data available really hoping that there'll be further contributions to this to this work um i didn't mention much about our work on education but higher education has also been a big part of our of our work and we find in uh from our research that native americans have started to attain levels of higher education those that actually get through are are are successful however we also find that those uh native americans who've gained either graduate um they've graduated with a b a or even a professional degree are not being paid at the same level and and and we don't quite know why that is but there is a huge um uh salary gap between um between that so i would uh really encourage you to take a look um at your leisure of course reservation employer establishments i think is interesting because it looks obviously at the impact of gaming and it finds that there's a huge concentration of jobs in two sectors of the workforce on on reservations and that would be the uh is it recreation and entertainment sector and the government administration sector and that really cries out for a need to diversify especially as we see online gaming or sports betting gaming a downtick in the gaming industry will certainly have impacts so these are the different ways that you can look at this material and and and use it um and then lastly i did want to show you um i don't think it's going to be here gosh uh we have our healthy children the healthy nations convening that was the early child i mean we had early childhood convening and um just a a lot of really good resources that supports these different convenings so this would be early learning this would be our financial institutions and where we had broad participation around the the mortgage lending or i mean i should say the banking industry this is the launch of our of our book and um and some other resources this i i really think is quite fantastic because it was the first time as i said coming together on a national level and and really taking a look at the you know the the historical trauma so that's um that's a lot of what we have here and um a lot of materials just completely devoted to to home ownership and we've tried to make it accessible with data with our federal programs um you can start at different places into into the conversation yes yeah and and that's a really politically sensitive topic oftentimes because if you're a tribe you know you're a tribe you're a tribal nation you don't have to prove it but in the federal way you do have to prove it and there's a bureau of um acknowledgement at the Bureau of Indian Affairs that has hired many many anthropologists and they have an elaborate um application process if you will that has to show continuous existence and continuous form of governance from pre-contact and many of these proof if you will are not readily available in any real tangible historical record and sometime that can be used against you especially for tribes in the east that had um relationships with colonial governments that then of course did you know went away when you the new federal government became um and that was the Mashantucket Piqua tribe in in eastern uh Connecticut so the eastern Piquats were recognized not through the federal acknowledgement process but through a land claim settlement act you'll often hear that um that term or that phrase is that lands were taken they were disputed there was no compensation so tribes in in the last couple decades have come back and said these are our lands and you mentioned reparations this is another way that that tribes are trying to seek for themselves or reparations so in the process of settling that land claim the Mashantucket Piqua tribe was recognized otherwise the process for acknowledgement takes a lifetime in many respects we now have 573 federally recognized tribes and seven of which were just recognized last year these are seven tribes from Virginia that have existed for uh as we say time immemorial but now just recently got that special designation and it's not special in in that sense it's it's what they are and have been um but it's extremely time consuming very very costly and the percentage of of tribal nations that are actually recognized are very low so and and you've got this procedure administrative process built into it so it can be um a very very long process but state recognized tribes like the Lumbee actually have substantial um benefits from from that relationship as well yeah