An untapped resource

Tuesday in Legislative Action Committee Tribal Council discussed the Public Records Ordinance, and even voted to move the potentially new law on to a first reading at our next Wednesday night meeting. As we’ve seen in the past, a first reading is by no means a guarantee that anything becomes Tribal law, but at least membership get to take a gander, and unlike our formerly new Ethics Ordinance, know what exactly I was writing about in Tilixum Wawa.
Provided Council doesn’t flip-flop between now and May 2nd, unfortunately always a real possibility, that document (the Public Records Ordinance) will be available for members to peruse. What they’ll see is a law that lays out what they are able to see, and what they can’t see. It probably won’t satisfy everybody, in fact I personally would have loosened things up a bit had the decision rested solely on my shoulders, but at least we now have a starting point.
What I hope this ordinance does is plant a certain seed in the minds of many Tribal members. That seed, if anybody wonders, is curiosity. While we commonly think of curiosity as killing the cat, I prefer to think of curiosity as the trait which fuels the desire to learn, adventure and experiment. Some of our greatest inventions are the product of curiosity, as are stories by investigative journalists, books by historians, and who knows what else.
The point I’m trying to make is that seeking the truth tends to be very enlightening in ways both satisfying and shocking. I don’t mean that in some sort of philosophical or spiritual way. No, I mean it in the everyday way.
Most Tribal members, I fear, probably aren’t aware that over the last year Tribal Council has started a number of practices that could mean a whole lot more twenty years from now than they do in the present day. A number of them stem from our work with ECONorthwest, which despite what you may hear from others on Tribal Council I still consider the source of very good advice, while others were generated out of the collective thinking of us nine.
The most notable of course is our new approach to record-keeping and transparency. We began our new operating procedures one year ago, and the biggest differences have been in restricting Tribal Council to only two meeting days per week, Tuesday and Thursday, and of taking minutes (that is official notes and summaries) of each and every meeting we hold. Most importantly, we actually record all meetings in which there is no motion for Executive Session.
I suppose if you’re not on Council that might sound rather insubstantial, but from my point of view it has been quite the opposite. What is happening now is a well-kept summary on the deliberations by Tribal Council on every major decision we make. Not only written accounts, but audio versions as well. Tribal members can actually listen to the conversations we have.
One month ago I tried unsuccessfully for a third time to get Tribal Council to agree to record even our Executive Sessions. Like I expected, the idea went down in flames, evidently too many on Council are still paranoid about recordings of key issues like our off-reservation gaming strategy being leaked out, like we don’t have a problem with with leaking already. But I still felt it worth a shot, even if under some sort of provision like those recordings would be available maybe a year or two later, kind of like how the FBI declassifies some documents after a certain amount of time has passed. My reasoning was simply that in the future Tribal members who really want to know what happened would have an avenue to seek the truth, no matter how tedious and long-winded. Plus, with so many of our meetings being open to the public and with so many Tribal members living outside of Grand Ronde, audio recordings seemed the next best thing.
Part of my reason also is that as we delve further into the inevitable enrollment issue, I find myself more and more wishing to have been a fly on the wall during 1998 and 1999, when much of the discussion that lead to the Grand Ronde’s only Constitutional amendment took place. You see, even after having talked with numerous key players from that era, I still remain unsatisfied with what versions have been told me. For as unpopular and obviously monumental that decision was, I haven’t seen much owning up to it. I’ve heard very few people who figured prominently in that decision ever produce a comprehensive explanation, at least not publicly. Yet obviously somebody drove it, or else it wouldn’t have happened.
So in a lot of ways, I guess my goal really is to know who was responsible for what, and why certain decisions were made that in hindsight seem wrong. This isn’t necessarily an issue of giving membership an opportunity to know that truth. It’s also about holding people accountable for decisions.
I hope more people take the time to listen to recordings of our meetings and work sessions. Often the truth of most matters, and by this I really mean the logic behind some decisions, is convoluted, and sometimes very odd. Some times what is said in a public Wednesday night meeting is vastly different from what was said behind closed doors in Council chambers. I’ll never be comfortable with that.