 Welcome to the State of Working America podcast where we seek to elevate workers' voices to ensure they're heard in the economic policy debate here in Washington and beyond. I'm your host Pedro Dacosta and I have a real treat for you guys today. It's my pleasure to welcome Patrice Kunesh. She is the director of the Minneapolis Feds Center for Indian Country Development. And we get to talk about something that is just not ever in the news, not ever in the press. In fact, I would say there's negative coverage of this issue, which is Native Americans and their role in the economy and the challenges they face. So welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm just thrilled to be here. It's my pleasure. You know, we spoke a while back when I was reporting on the Fed and you taught me about the concept of asterisk nation and that stuck with me. And I was wondering if you could explain to our listeners what that means. Yes. I choose the term asterisk nation to reflect the fact that American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians, Indigenous peoples generally are not included in the conversation, in the reporting, in the data collection, data collection around really important types of information, social economic conditions, educational attainment, and such. Oftentimes you'll see a report come out on the well-being of children and there's no reference to Native Americans. There'll be the white population, the black population, Hispanic, Asian, but there'll be nothing about Native Americans. And what you'll find is an asterisk at the bottom of the page or maybe in the footnotes that reference to another category. We're sort of collected generally in another category or not collected at all. So what does that mean? It means that we're invisible. And when we're invisible, we feel like that's a modern form of racism, tell you the truth. Now Native Americans are not races in the political, we're political entities. The relationship between tribes and the federal government is a legal political relationship as is the relationship between citizens and the tribal nation. But to not be included in any demographic information is a form of denigration and being dismissive. And the Native population is a very significant part of the overall history and culture and society of the United States. Of course we're the first Americans here and we want to be counted. Not only do we want to be counted, we want to show the disparities in terms of how our communities, how our peoples are performing relative to others. And that in turn then shows where policies are not working, what policies are broken, where the inflection points are in terms of where we need to study more. So Asterix Nation is something that we really need to overcome and we can do that by having conversations like this, by having economists and researchers really take a close look. And even my institution, including Native Americans in the employment demographics and as part of the overall population to which it's responsible. So as a Fed reporter I was fascinated to stumble upon the incredible machine that is the community development function of the Fed that a lot of people don't know exists. Because people think of the Fed as a regulatory body and also as an interest setting agency but they don't know that the community development work exists. And the reason I really enjoyed it as a reporter was that it covers the social issues that I'm really interested in. And in your case it covers an area again of economics that nobody's paying attention to. Can you talk about some of the work that your center is doing specifically and about some of the findings that your research has come up with and particularly some of the more shocking statistics and disparities that you find? Okay, well the Center for Indian Country Development was established four and a half years ago and I was actually in Washington D.C. at the time that I was recruited for the job. I was overseeing the Rural Development Agency at the Department of Agriculture and I saw the enormous influence of federal funds going into building communities literally from the ground up. There were homes providing utilities and broadband. And so when I stepped into the center role and tried to figure out okay, where can we really make a difference? I wanted to look at where the money is and then of course where the money isn't and housing and home ownership was a big part of that. I knew that home ownership is a part of foundational wealth development asset building and I wanted to examine what does that look like in Indian Country? We know that education is a big equalizer but what about access to good quality education? So we brought in an education component and then everything in Indian Country touches and concerns the land. So we said let's figure out what is the, how does the land influence community and economic development? And then private economies, business development, entrepreneurship was our fourth area that we took a look at. And right off the bat I have to say that some of the research findings we encountered were really quite shocking. And for example we found that in terms of home ownership we might on the one hand see a very general high rate of home ownership in Indian Country. But these are homes that have been inherited or built by themselves. These are not homes that have been acquired through a mortgage. And when we started looking at the HMDA data, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, we were really surprised. We find that conventional lenders have really retreated from the market. We find that Native American financial institutions have stepped in to fill that void of capital. The CDFI funds for example, Native Banks, Native Credit Unions. But then when we took a closer look at how federal programs are performing, we found that one program in particular, the HUD 184 Home Loan Guarantee which is synonymous as it says on its web page with home ownership was really bypassing the reservation. And it showed us two things. One is that there is a strong demand for home ownership amongst Native American borrowers. And that also showed that they have the capacity to borrow, meaning they have good income and worthy credit scores. But it also showed us that where this lending was happening was off the reservation, which means that the whole point of building communities around housing and home ownership with good schools and recreation and such and so forth was missing Indian Country in a big way. Billions of dollars were actually being diverted off the reservation. And that is really striking because home ownership, having a home, a safe, secure, reliable home to come to, to come home to is sort of the foundation of any community. And we needed to shine a light on it and really show folks that we're not there yet and why aren't we there. And we find that although Native peoples have sovereignty over their lands, they don't have control over the processes to allow them to put the land to good and productive use. Can you explain that a little bit? Yes. The lands that are held, the lands on reservations are held by the federal government, legal ownership. And so these are called trust lands. And these trust lands, although they're original Indian lands or Native peoples lands, the federal government has control over the use. So I wanted to get a mortgage on my allotted lands on the South Dakota side of the Standing Rock Reservation. I have to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior. And that office has an elaborate process for leasehold mortgages. It has another elaborate process for obtaining a mortgage and then getting certified title reports. And oftentimes it can take five years to close a mortgage on the lands, which is a huge disincentive for any sort of lender to work in Indian country. So I was going to ask you whether it was an issue of redlining, an issue of lack of proximity to the actual financial institutions. But you're telling me that there's a structural issue that really underlies the lack of... because if people have high income and they're good credit, you'd think the banks would have an incentive to go there. Yes. And this was a guaranteed loan product, right? So the disincentive is the bureaucracy that's just elaborate and multilayered. And HUD's process is different than the rural development, which is different from the VA. So very few lenders really want to get into this business of lending because it is so enormously complex, time-consuming and obviously costly. What are some of the challenges on the employment side? And what are the unemployment rates like in various areas compared to the rest of the population? So that will vary. We have 573 tribal nations, and each one has a very distinct footprint and community. And so what we see generally that employment on reservations tend to be really centered around gaming. Those tribes that have gaming, you can see that have very healthy employment records. And employment means also benefits. And benefits is healthcare. It means like you have retirement accounts. And we see some really, really strong economic development. Those tribes that do not have gaming and tribal governments that turn to either natural resources or other types of economic development sometimes will see higher unemployment rates. And in those communities we also see though higher self-employment rates. So there's a different kind of economy operating. It may not be this typical currency exchange outside of Indian country. I wanted to ask, are there challenges that Native American women face that are distinct from, say, women and other minorities? Because whenever I read about it I hear about a lot of stories of just terrible rates of abuse and the like. There is a tragic, pervasive sense of violence against Native women. But it also comes through in economic ways. So for example, education, we see more Native women in different forms of education, higher education. But we may not see women in the workforce or they're not being compensated in the workforce at the same level or degree. We see women suffering from health problems. Certainly lack of maternal health care and then post-natal health care really hurts literally, physically hurts Native women. But you touched on something that is so prevalent and so striking and that is the violence against women. And the Department of Justice, the Center for Disease Control, have all looked at this and Native women suffered disproportionately, grossly disproportionately high incidence of violence. And this is all sorts of violence from sexual violence and trafficking to physical violence, high mortality rates, and we think it's from violent encounters. We recently did a study of the Minneapolis police and it was a general study by somebody outside of the center. But what they found and shared with us was really alarming and that was the encounters of Minneapolis police and we thought, oh, it may be black people, it may be black male people. But what was really striking was that it was a significantly high proportionate encounter with Native women and they'd be stopped as a suspicious person. Now maybe there was a good outcome like the police officer was walking the woman home but this says something that there's something else going on perhaps and it's geographically located. So we're seeing the development of task forces across several states to study public safety with regards to Native women and that really is about data collection and data sharing because as we see criminal jurisdiction on reservations or outside the reservations, shared responsibilities between the federal, state, and tribal law enforcement authorities, they're just not talking to each other. So we really don't know where things are happening and where things are missing but we do know that an inordinate number of Native women have gone missing and those absences have not been investigated. They've turned up brutally beaten or murdered and that has not been investigated and the sad thing is that we believe that there's a gross underreporting of violent incidences as well so whatever we think we know, I think it's actually a lot worse. Wow. That's really sobering. You mentioned data and of course you're at the Federal Reserve and data is your bed and butter. I was wondering what obstacles have you run into as far as finding relevant data and being able to get as granular as you'd like to be about Native American populations? It's really hard to get data. We usually end up with US Census data or American Survey data which is very aggregated data and what we really want to know is the lived experience, the real experience in our communities and to do that it would be very costly, it would be quite an elaborate process but that's where we want to go. We've got a project underway and I find it, I think it's going to be really exciting where we have a native owned bank that has a very well established financial institution in Greater Wisconsin and they want to open up a branch in the community of another tribal nation that has no financial institution. So here we're at the very front end and we're able to evaluate through survey, through community conversation the uptake and the attitudes toward having a financial institution in the community. Does that mean that people will have savings accounts and will that savings account lead to good credit scores and that credit scores then support home ownership or other kind of really essential lending and borrowing. So that's the kind of I think research that we need is at the community level from the community and we just didn't go out there and say let's do it. We had to go through the IRB process of the receiving community and they really had to know and understand our motivations because of course you can imagine there's a lot of distrust of large institutions. Sure. Well actually that's exactly what my next question was. You spoke about the economic diversity, of course there's an enormous range of cultural diversity among tribes. How does that make it difficult to organize politically and civically as a kind of constructed unit if you will and how are those bridges gapped between various tribes? Yeah that's a good question. Historically tribes have really collaborated with other tribal nations and they had very extensive networks for commerce and trade. Of course they would recognize each other's leaders and if there was a challenge against them they would literally band together to fend off those forces and nowadays we have economic forces, we have political forces and one of the really good organizations working across Indian country, Pan-Indian if you will is the National Congress of American Indians and they are a member organization that represent the majority of tribes and they're here in Washington DC and they are out there advocating every day and in so many ways for Native American issues, political, social, legal issues. They're also regional organizations like the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Association and the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Association and I think more recently they've come together to look at regional economies and what can they do collectively to benefit the larger whole? And how do you see Native American activists integrating with a broader civil rights movement in community? I feel like there's a lot of activism happening around the country whether it's union protests or we had I think the most prominent news event in the Native American community were the Keystone Pipeline protests that now as we see there has been a spill so the concerns of the people there seem to have come to pass. So I was just wondering how you see Native Americans integrating into the broader civil rights community. It's actually I think a lot of good energy, a lot of good energy and the Keystone situation happened on the Standing Rock Reservation near Cannonball which is where my family resides and it was very disruptive in a lot of ways both to the community, to the state, to the region but it was disruptive in a good way in that we really had to take a close look at how do we organize what's the framework and what's the message, right? My first job out of law school was with the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder, Colorado and I think of them as not only a public interest law firm that took on treaty rights but they really showed and laid the way for legal activism that I think leads to economic activism that leads to social activism especially around Indian child welfare, around environmental issues like water and sacred sites cultural issues like language and so forth what we're seeing though from a lot of these other activities is a sense of needing to get out and vote and I'm hoping that as we think of housing and we think of education as we think of really building community we're also supporting civic engagement and there's actually a study by Indigenous economist Randi Aki that showed higher income in this one community, the Eastern Band of Cherokee and it was a very modest increase of income actually had very positive impacts and one of the impacts was more civic engagement and I think once we have a sense of stability or security we have some opportunity to say okay how can I help support the rest of the community so I certainly hope that civic engagement is spread far and wide we've got some terrific advocates out there right now new organizations called Illuminative by Crystal Echo Hawk, Indian Collective with Nick Tilson really fantastic on the ground community oriented sort of activist type organizations so I know we have to let you get back to the mild Minneapolis weather but I want to ask you as we're having this conversation it dawns on me that as you said you are the first Americans and yet most Americans know so little about Native American culture and are taught so little in school how should schools integrate Native American history into their curriculum in a way that doesn't sort of commoditize or kind of mischaracterize Native American culture well I think this is part of another sort of social activism effort underway which is called reclaiming Native truth and words matter you know for example we hear a lot of talk about tribal and tribalism and actually it's used in a derisive way right it means faction and division when in fact you know Native communities are really about communal or community experience and the bonds and connections to the land so I think we need to be mindful of that we need to be mindful of mascots and other types of cultural appropriation as we're here in the home of the redskins no we don't I shall not say that well no I'm all for changing the name but 72% of Americans most never actually encounter or seek out information about Native Americans and 27 states have no mention of Native Americans in their K-12 curriculum and more than that 87% of state history standards do not mention Native American history after 1900 so again Asterix Nation we don't exist we're invisible and in some states actually erase tribes and reservations off their official maps they just don't want us to exist so what are the consequences what's at stake not only are this negatively impacting Native peoples there's just a lot of misconceptions and there's just so many misunderstandings that continue a negative perspective about who is an American Indian so we're still in survival mode and I think we're fighting for our sovereign rights but we're also fighting for our self-identification so I guess what I see is great hope for our people for Native nations the history of Native America is really one of strength and resilience and persistence we're the fastest growing segment of the population our incomes are rising faster than other segments certainly not enough but we're seeing a very steady improvement and I know that our history and our ways are really built around values of kindness and compassion and caring for one another and I think that's really the key to our future as well is supporting each other and looking at it through the lens of sort of what are these colonial tools is it education is it participating in the workforce is it holding office you know federal office it's being Native people being elected to very prominent positions and that carries a voice well beyond their particular community or their particular state so I have really great hope that not only are we going to be seen and no longer invisible but we're going to be able to tell an accurate story and use the resources real strong evidence to make good decisions and to you know ensure that the services and the obligations that are owed and due to Native peoples are actually fulfilled thank you so much that was Patrice Kunesh director of the Center for Indian Country Development at the Minneapolis Fed that was a real pleasure I really appreciate your time thank you thanks for stopping by the State of Working America podcast you can watch us on YouTube you can download us on iTunes, Stitcher wherever you get your podcast or go to epi.org slash podcast thank you so much for listening