D.C. Days (Daze?)

According to Jack Giffen, Jr., the trip he, Reyn Leno, Rob Greene and I will be making to our nation’s capitol from June 4 until June 7 is his 22nd journey to Washington, D.C. For me, it will be my third. The first trip I made was back in February of this year, during the Annual Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians Conference in Portland, where most of our Council would be. I left on a Monday.
My first trip, from a business standpoint, was the definition of uneventful. I was there to offer Grand Ronde’s historical perspective of Cowlitz and their claim to La Center in Washington State for, what else, building a casino. We, being Rob Greene, one of our lobbyists, Jack Giffen, Jr., a professor knowledgable of Indians in western Washington, and a consultant whose name eludes me right now, met on a blustery Tuesday to review our presentation that we would be making to the Department of the Interior. No more than a few hours before our meeting, snow began to fall everywhere, and most government offices from what I could tell shut down in preparation of icy roads and other hazardous conditions. Our meeting was to be rescheduled within three weeks, meaning another trip.
The weather would have other effects, as the following day while we waited in line at Dulles Airport, complete havoc broke out, at least with our airline, and the excessive lines caused our Tribal attorney and I to miss our flights. We would not be able to rebook for two days. One the drive back to our respective lodgings, he a hotel and me my brother’s new condominium, a sheet of ice flew off of the vehicle proceeding in front of our taxi. The ice struck our windshield, not only shattering it, but forcing the taxi driver to pull over for about a 45 minutes to wait for not only a substitute cab, but a police officer to draw up a report.
On the flip side, the extra day in limbo, though D.C. was a frosty wasteland, gave me an opportunity to visit the National Museum of the American Indian. The trip then wasn’t a total loss, I guess.
During the return trip two weeks later I would be accompanied by four other Council members, as our meeting coincided with the annual conference of the National Congress of American Indians. Of course, my arrival in D.C. was delayed by a day as entering the Portland airport I would learn that snow locally and in Chicago would make me unable to catch a flight for another two days. While I successfully made it to D.C. this time, and our meeting with Interior did happen, two key officials of that department failed to show for our conference. On the trip back, snow storms would keep me in D.C. another day.
If you’re wondering why I am writing all this, well, even I am really making one of those roundaboutpoints. I suppose it might be the out-of-town Tribal members who asked why I would not be in the office this week. My answer one would probably guess is never simple. You see, there is a lot to our job as Council members that I think most people are unaware of, and I don’t mean some of the more common things like emails, phone calls, and Council meetings. Travel and meetings with local, regional, and national officials and representatives of different agencies are some of them.
If you’ve read my biography on the Tribe’s website, then anybody would know that I like to travel. But travel for pleasure and travel for business are not the same. In fact, they are completely different. One type is almost always fun, the other can be fun at times but usually isn’t. The great exception of course is conferences.
Over the next two days, the four of us will have 17 different meetings with various officials and/or their representatives. We will meet early the morning to review all the bullet points and decide who says what and when, and often, how. There will be 30 minutes between each meeting in which we regroup and quickly repeat the process all over again. All of us were given a packet that will we all read on the plane flight over and will continue to act as a cheat sheet. The range of entities with whom we meet will be senators, governors, BIA and Interior agents, and others. We will be discussing gaming, off-reservation gaming, different forms of legislation affecting our Tribe, who knows what else?
In many ways, this is some of the most important yet thankless work we can do as Council members. Despite the numerous reports on infinite topics out there, many officials here in D.C., like Council members, rarely have the time to thoroughly read everything which ends on our desks. In other words, much of what we present in D.C. might have and in some cases should have already been known by the people we meet with, but just the nature of bureaucracy sometimes prevents that from happening. The face-to-face meetings are the opportunity to stress those bullet points and make that decisive impression.
I can’t say that there is a definite scientific method of knowing whether our visits and presentations are the decisive factors we would like them to be. What we do know is that it’s completely necessary, like re-oiling the parts of an eternal machine, one that everybody who wants something to happen must do. It rarely gets brought up in Wednesday night or General Council meetings, and yet we continue to do it. Why? Because we have to, and because I get the feeling that for some official back east to hear from and speak with a Tribal leader and not an attorney or lobbyist makes the biggest difference of all.