Community Standards

I wasn’t present for yesterday’s Legislative Action Committee. What I’ve been told is that Executive Session was called, staff left, and Council went into a lengthy conversation about whether one of the questions boxes for the Candidates’ Forum on August 22 was “compromised”. A Record of Instruction was drafted and signed by six Council members to conduct an investigation into the allegations, as supposedly a Tribal Council member was the culprit and he now wants to clear his name.

I am in the hotel lobby of the Tuscany Casino & Suites in Las Vegas, Nevada, while typing this blog post. The training I attended here, Falmouth Institute’s “Tribal Constitutions & By-Laws” ended earlier than expected, leaving me a few hours of down time before catching my flight back to Portland. There are times I wonder what goes on back in the office, and when it is stuff like this, what more can a person do but wince and smile?

With smaller and more intimate meetings, I tend to favor conferences and trainings like this because it allows me some one-on-one time with other Tribal leaders. That means swapping “war stories”, which are basically anecdotes of our experiences doing what we do. Not all here are Tribal Council members, some are administrators and managers. One is a consultant. I am tempted to share this most recent story of the hand in the question box. It is on par with much of the story-telling we’ve engaged in here, the kind that seems right out of a movie or banana republic.

It will probably take me another posting to get into the specifics of this training. Informative it has been. But I will share one nugget of information, the kind most of us already know but never truly grasp until we see it laid out before us objectively, concisely, and almost academically. I learned about “community standards”, which relates to this most recent fiasco.

Some Tribes won’t allow their leaders to be or have been convicted felons. Others eliminate you from seeking re-election if you’ve been found guilty of misconduct while in office. They have constitutions with specific language for both. We are neither one of those types of tribes. Our standards, that you must be 18 years old and an enrolled member, are pretty basic. We’ve at least one convicted felon in office, and Council members have been re-elected right on the heels of being found guilty of violating our ethics ordinance. I am tempted right now to throw out some sort of opinion here, but am not sure if that’s necessary.

Two years ago, prior to the advisory vote on SMGI, one of our Wednesday night meetings went longer, and nastier than usual. Our consideration of removing board members started a fire. We explained the reasons, the Council/board member ordering buffalo meat be bought from his friend, the Council/board member ordering a staff give surveillance footage to a friend so they could file a lawsuit, notably. But the audience there were die-hard loyalists. Nothing would change their mind. We were the villains.

There are a handful of Tribal members who I remember from that night. I’ve never looked at them the same. They defended wrong-doing out of political allegiance. They indicated then and there that they would support their chosen leaders and political allies no matter what. It was, as I saw Jesse Ventura admonish FOX News’ Sean Hannity several weeks ago, politics at its worst.

I am not sure how much steam the question box scandal will generate. It might be very little, which would be sad, but hardly surprising. There could be some outrage. What there will definitely be is defense of the instigator, even if it had been caught on camera. That he has been suspended for unethical behavior before matters little. Grand Ronde has at times shown way too much tolerance for misconduct of its Tribal leaders, so much that this kind of stuff can be doubted, defended, blown off, and even forgotten. I am curious, and hopeful, to see if our voting membership favors raising the community standard.

Here’s one story that was swapped to me. A regional tribe hosted an election for its Chief. The position was voted on separately. Two well-known and respected Elders sought the position, as well as a younger man with a known drug problem. The two Elders siphoned enough votes from each other that the younger man won the election, the position which by the carried a ten-year term. He had attendance problems from the start, refused to remove his cap during invocation, and was in office for one-fourth his term before they were able to unseat him by means I am not clear on. His election was both an indictment of community standards and the present electoral system, both of which I presume have changed since.