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[Kiowa “Honor Song” by Cozad Singers plays]

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Hello. My name is Rich Luarkie. I'm from the Pueblo of Laguna. I've had the opportunity and the the honor to serve as the governor for our tribe. 2011 to 2014.

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Prior to that, I had an opportunity to also serve as a lieutenant governor and have served in the council for a number of years and other community roles.

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When I look at the history of tribes, Tribal nations, Tribal communities, Tribal people, it's really important to make sure that we don't forget the community part. I think over the years, we've seen many

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nation building efforts focus on the building of the Tribal government and the Tribal economic engines. And the third leg of that stool, which is the community, is often not in the equation, or they just become,

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an afterthought of the equation.

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So in order to do effective nation building, all three of the legs of the stool have to be equally engaged. They each have a role. They each have a responsibility. So I think a nation building has been around for many years now. And these, in my mind, are the lessons learned that we have to do a better job of engaging community in this because they become, again, not a, not only a critical element of the equation, but they become a beneficiary and an influencer.

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And and a contributor to the nation. We have many people, many Tribal members across all tribes that are well-educated, that are experienced, whether it's in formal education, vocational education or just the school of hard knocks. We have very talented people, and it's time that we began to leverage and capitalize the talent in our communities to build our, our nations.

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For the Pueblo of Laguna, we've had a long and storied history around nation building, around economic creation, in particular. For Laguna, like many tribes, there's there's also times of resetting and recalibrating. And I believe at this stage we're at a recalibration stage and the Covid 19, public health pandemic emergency really contributed to a shifting of minds how we work differently in this day and age, but also the things that we need to consider going forward, like technology.

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So I think for Laguna right now, it's reevaluating the difference between economic development, because in my mind, the old model and the old school of economic development is a deficit model. It looks at what we don't have and it tries to fill the gaps different from creating the next generation model, which I would call alternative asset development, where we look at the assets and the value of our community, including our people.

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And I would term this ‘alternative,’ when I when I spell it, A-L-T-E-R is all lowercase, N-A-T-I-V-E is all uppercase. So it's building on the alternative assets of our community and our people. That's how I would define nation building for Laguna to relegitimize and reengage and celebrate the talent and the assets of our community.

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Without people, you don't have a nation. And as we continue down this path of blood quantum as as a... decider, if you will, of who belongs and who doesn't. It's a matter of time when we'll see significant diminishing. So I think it's going to be very, very important to think about how we

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design, define and grow our communities and our nations.

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I think enrollment is critical because it informs how much land we need for housing. It informs the size of schools that we need, the types of schools that we need. It informs the amount of services that go out to a community. We can't have a community that is is this big or not growing. And we're planning for this or the or vice versa.

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It's not an efficient use of resource. So I think enrollment is absolutely critical for the mechanics of a nation. But I think enrollment is even more important for the continuation and the spirit of a nation.

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We can be like any other tribe, any other nation. What differentiates us is our spirit, and that's defined by our people. So we should always embrace our children, our grandparents, our mothers, our fathers, all our... we should embrace our people. That's the spirit.

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I've had the the honor, the privilege, to serve as the co-chair for the, Pueblo of Laguna’s enrollment or, membership committee.

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Just just to differentiate, we do have an enrollment, committee that that deals with the actual applications and membership, but we have a membership committee that was sanctioned by the council to look at how do we define who belongs. If you will. So the committee was sanctioned by the Tribal Council a number of years ago.

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20--, might have been 2014. And much of the work we did initially was research and just educating ourselves about what is this? What is this thing? Blood quantum? What is this thing and how does it apply to our tribe? What are the laws, if any, that apply or that make it a requirement? Educating ourselves as committee members.

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One of the things that we intentionally made a decision on from the beginning was that this was not a conversation and this was not work about benefits. This was about who belongs. We caught ourselves getting cross-eyed with each other because we were getting into the debate of benefits. Who gets what and who doesn't? That took us away from the core responsibility of what the Council tasked us to do.

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So it was a self-discipline effort to come back and focus on who belongs and how do we belong. So the way we engage... So that was focused on on the committee itself, getting ourselves aligned and calibrated to do the work. How we engaged community started with what we called the Who Belongs Conference. And we had over 1200 people attend over two and a half days.

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And this conference was specific to Laguna. We invited all our Tribal members, as many that could make it. We had people physically there, we had people on YouTube. We did a YouTube channel. And they engaged in that manner. We gave a history. We started with the history of our Tribe. Our creation. We had some traditional people, tell our creation story.

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And that was very critical because what it did is it reinforced or illuminated the fact that we're all of one creation. We're all of one source. That set the stage for the next two days of work, of understanding the history of blood quantum. Where did it come from? Where do we need to go? What's been the impact? And then what are the solutions? And engage in input from community.

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And one of the things we found in that process is community, there may be some naysayers, but when those individuals have the opportunity to share their their input, it was precious in two different ways. We got the benefit of their views, of what they see, but it was also precious in the sense that they got to voice what was inside.

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That was good. That was great. We also then had smaller focus sessions in the community that engaged what I would call focus groups. So we had single parents. We had parents that were Tribal members but their children were not. We had elders, so we had these different focus groups just to get as many different perspectives as we could.

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So that's another way we engaged community, which ultimately led to the outcome of now, here's a recommendation to the Tribal Council as to how we go forward. And so there's a lot more work that went into that. But, that was the main, approach that we used. Also trying to defunct some of those myths, if you will, that community members had was part of this work. As an example,

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many people, in particular our elders, believed that doing away with blood quantum meant that we would lose access to federal resources like HUD, Indian Health Service. Things like that. BIA. With the help of the University of Arizona Law School with then-Professor Robert Hershey, his law students did some pretty incredible research for us. They researched all these federal agencies, any federal agency that put hands or resources to tribes, how many of them require blood quantum in order to receive service?

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One. That was a BIA scholarship program. All the others, they didn't care how an individual was identified as a member. The only thing they cared about was that you're a member. Didn't matter if it was blood quantum, if it was descendancy, if it was whatever. All they cared about was you're a member. And they didn't care how that was determined from the tribe.

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The scholarship program from BIA was the only one. So there was no effect if blood quantum went away other than the scholarship program. So, that's the kind of work we did in order to support community and beginning and trying to help calm fears that, if we moved away from blood quantum, we would lose access to ABC resource or XYZ agency.

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So. So that's the kind of work we did to try to make this a productive and useful, but also palatable, approach for our community because we didn't want it to be where there's a lot of analytical words or technical jargon used. We wanted it to be palatable that people could understand. So that's how we approached it.

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In the enrollment, and membership piece, When we looked at solutions, it was not the committee's responsibility to say, this is it. It was our responsibility to say, here are the options and here's why. We looked at just doing away with blood quantum and doing decendancy. That flew like the lead balloon, and that was interesting because when we did the conference or the Who Belongs, I would say 98% of the surveys that we received back said they didn't want to see,

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they didn't want to use blood quantum anymore. So that was an interesting scenario. So that was one option. Another option was do nothing. Leave it as is. And then, you know, another option was recognize those that are naturalized right now that meet the one-eighth requirement, grandfather them in. But on a go-forward basis, if a person or family or parent, whoever is registering the child can demonstrate they have ties to Laguna,

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Let them be Laguna. That was our recommended solution. Right now, it's already required that when an application is done, they have to do a family tree. So going back to their great grandparent. So in our minds of the committee, the membership committee, that process is already there. Plus in our Tribal constitution, in the Laguna Tribal constitution, in the membership section,

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there's a section there, a clause, that says that regardless of paternity being established, blood quantum or any other issue, the Tribal Council has final say as to whether or not an individual can be a member. So, you can check all the boxes and the Council could still say no. Or you could check one or none of the boxes, and the Council could say yes.

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So this is where it aligned for us with the idea that if you can show tie to Laguna, whether it's through your mother or father or both, then you should be Laguna. So that was our recommended solution. And right now that solution is sitting with the Tribal Council as we speak, you know, waiting for a decision as to how we move forward with it.

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And it's unfortunate because,

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It's not it's not a matter of policy. It's not a matter of money. It's not a matter of some historical law. It's a matter of exercising our sovereignty. And in this instance, we're not exercising it to allow those children to belong.

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I believe that

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leaders, when we're considering citizenship or membership,

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a big part of that includes looking to the future.

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In a leadership role, you're not a manager. You're a leader. You're working on the organization, not in the organization. And in saying that, where is your tribe going to be in ten years and 20 years? We have to have the long view. And enrollment and citizenship is a significant, necessary contributor to where we're going to be. And so I believe that in order to be able to make effective decisions, you have to have a good idea of where you want to take your people.

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You have to engage the people to inform where they want to go. And so I believe that leaders need to think about their own situation.

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They need to think about how we create an environment that is welcoming versus exclusive. And I'll share a short story where in the late 1950s, when our Tribe made the the change from being one-half Indian to requiring that you be one-half Laguna,

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that the governor at the time that implemented it in 1959 was an adamant supporter of the shift from one-half Indian to one-half Laguna.

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Leapfrog to many years later. Now I'm serving as governor. The governor back then, from the 50s, is now an elder.

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His grandchildren have come up for membership. They don't qualify. And he's upset with me to fix it. When the decision was made back here. So leaders need to be mindful, as I said, looking with the long view. And granted, we don't have a crystal ball. But how do you make the best decisions for the future? Are we making decisions so that we have great policy on enrollment, or are we making the best decision so that our children can belong?

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It can be... It can be both. So those are the things that I think leaders need to to think about. And I'm sure there's many more. But I think in the experience that, that I've had with my own Tribe, and the privilege that the Tribal Council has given me over the years to serve in that capacity on the membership committee, has educated me and and I hope that I've shared, you know, with our community, too, the things we need to think about critically.

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We need to critically think about this issue, not just, a touchy feely issue. It's an issue that is... we need to critically think about.