Eric Henson On The Rippling Impacts Of Effective Tribal Governance And Decision Making

Eric Henson is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and has been a research fellow/affiliate with the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development (formerly known as the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development) since 1998.

He is also the inaugural Director of the Ittapila Program for Nation Building and Outreach at Harvard University. Mr. Henson teaches Nation Building II/Native Americans in the Twenty-First Century and Land Loss, Reclamation, and Stewardship in Contemporary Native America. In his role at Harvard, Mr. Henson has continuously served as an evaluator for Honoring Nations, an awards program that identifies, evaluates, and honors best practices in tribal governance all across the United States. In addition to his professional roles at Harvard, he holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University & is a primary author of The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under US Policies of Self-Determination, which was published by Oxford University Press. He has provided testimony to the US Congress on several occasions on issues relating to tribal governance and economic development.

Eric discusses honouring First Nations people, communities and stewardship in the United States and how tribal governance can help reimagine what's possible when addressing systemic social issues.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work today?

[Eric Henson] - I grew up in a small town in West Texas. In a certain sense, I never really imagined accessing the highest echelon of upper education. The place I grew up is a productive area for oil, and there are lots of opportunities for those who want to work in energy. I figured out at an early age that my mental muscle was probably greater than my physical muscle, so I wanted to see if I could cast myself into the pool of higher education and contribute to knowledge work. I didn't have a grand plan for exactly how I would make that happen, so I started junior college in West Texas at a small community college called Midland College. After that, I went to the University of Texas at San Antonio for my undergraduate degree, and then I got my Master's Degree in Economics from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Eventually I landed at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where I got a second Master's Degree in Public Policy. I applied to the Kennedy School with the explicit idea I would get to study tribal economic development, because there's a research centre there (the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development) focusing on this. I was interested in economics and how it might function in a native setting, and I felt extremely lucky to be admitted first try. This was a powerful experience for me as a student, and at the time I honestly thought I'd end up back in Texas working in the energy industry. However, I got lucky enough to start off consulting in the Boston area and I was then appointed as a research fellow with the Harvard Project. I graduated in the late 1990’s, loitered around the university and never quite left! I now live about three miles (five kilometres) outside of Harvard Square, and I'm a 1998 graduate. I tell people I'm moving away about one mile per decade, and eventually after a thousand years I might not even live in the Boston area anymore! What began as a little bit of ad hoc assistance with the Harvard Project became a full-time role, and I feel lucky I get to tell people that although I had no grand plan, I don't ever wake up now dreading work. In a certain sense, it's not work, it's just what I do every day. I have this unique platform to make the world a little bit better, and I jump out of bed every morning happy I’ve gotten this opportunity.

Can you tell us more about the scope of your work and the impact it's generating?

In a certain sense, we haven't come up with any original research telling people anything new.

What we've done from the start (even before I was at the Harvard Project) is try to understand the underpinnings of what works for native people and tribal communities.

Then we use the Harvard platform to consolidate those stories in a way that's easy to repackage and draw lessons from to help others. There's no reason for every tribe or First Nation community in Canada or Australia to necessarily relearn everything from scratch. There are a lot of negative things to deal with; there's a lot of heartache, sorrow, and poverty we all need to address. But there are also many positive developments in native affairs we can learn from. One of the ways we try to engage native people globally is to see where commonalities lie. We can then help communities, tribal leaders, elected officials, and non-profits who interface with Native people to think about how they can make a positive change. We have never approached the Harvard Project and research on Indigenous governance and development thinking we will publish a bunch of stuff and it will just end up on some academic’s shelf. We evaluate ourselves every day on whether our actions and interactions with native people globally are moving the ball forward to overcome centuries of poverty, desperation, and poor socioeconomic outcomes. These are all the negative things native people everywhere globally are facing.

What best practices in tribal governance have you observed throughout your work?

On a foundational level, what we’ve found works is native communities having a real say in their own outcomes. For far too long we've had (sometimes) benevolent outsiders say they will administer affairs to native communities or nations. This has never worked; the notion of giving the locus of decision-making control to the people who will bear the impacts (positive and negative) from those decisions is crucial. It might not sound incredibly insightful, but for a long time there was this idea globally that those who were colonised are unable to care for themselves. They were viewed as unable to make their own decisions, and so including native leadership in that decision making now is important. We must let them thrive when those decisions work or even bear the consequences when they don't, it’s about letting them have their own skin in the game. Coupled with that, we have found that capable governing institutions are important. The word bureaucracy (at least in America) often has a negative connotation, but good functioning bureaucracy is important. If your housing department doesn't have strong management policies and procedures, then the chronic housing shortages native communities face will never be addressed.

You need capable institutions to take on vexing and longstanding problems, but you also need to have a cultural match. You need the system’s governance, decision-making processes, and dispute resolution mechanisms to make sense to the community in which they're present.

This does not sound insightful, but the notion that imposing an outside form of government in a place just because it works somewhere else is completely wrong. Even though we might think that not doing this makes so much sense, this still happens. Think of military occupations in different places today, people roll in and say that because they’ve overthrown a dictator they will now bring their ideals of western democracy and elected democratic government to those places. This might not comport with what the community sees as a legitimate government. Bringing a cultural match to bear in a system of governance is important. One of the last things I'd say on a foundational level is public minded leadership is crucial. Having good leaders is important and having stability in your elected leadership (however you get there) is important because that gives those leaders time to practice being in an elected position. This works best when the individuals who are in those spots are publicly minded. They're not there for their own power, fame or fortune; they're there with a community minded spirit and thinking about how to overcome the tremendous barriers and obstacles of the past. They must also think about how they can share their success stories with others.

One thing I’m always energised about is how (for the most part) Native communities are open to sharing their successes with others, because learning from each other is such an integral part of the Indigenous worldview.

Knowledge is not necessarily something to be hoarded for personal gain. I’ve talked a bit about how different tribes approach issues of economic development and enterprise development. The taxation system here in the U.S for the most part prevents tribes from funding themselves, which is a common way in which governments everywhere in the world fund themselves. It's well known that several tribes in America have profitable gaming enterprises. Some tribes have gaming enterprises which are not that profitable. Being located next to a major metropolitan area helps a lot if you're competing for leisure dollars and gaming revenue, but some tribes (like my own) have a profitable casino enterprise. However, tribes in this situation still think continuously about how to diversify their business efforts, because those enterprise efforts replace what would be a tax base for many other non-tribal governments. Tribes here do things like government contracting, opening convenience stores, or sometimes manufacturing cigarettes. That enterprise development is highly specific to different places, and my own tribe now owns and runs a chocolate manufacturing facility in a small town in Oklahoma. I've not worked at the tribe, but this is just my understanding from the story as I know it. The chocolate factory is not highly profitable per se, but it was the major employer in this small town inside the Oklahoma reservation boundaries. The tribe viewed it as an employment maintenance investment, but we also have all sorts of tribal businesses. If you have some acumen already in terms of manufacturing, distribution, and marketing, and you have your own facilities in which you can create something like chocolate products, then you might be able to take that chocolate manufacturing facility which wasn't profitable and make something of it. At the same time, this provides job maintenance in a place that otherwise might find its biggest employer go out of business. You and I could debate about whether every single business venture a tribal enterprise development board engages in should be purely driven by return on investment or if there are other intangible criteria you should add into the mix. The question is should we make an investment only if it's going to make a quick return or because it has employment benefits or a potential payoff down the road when we might need to develop away from the reservation.

Tribes think about if there are places not inside their boundaries in which they might want to invest their earnings and continue to provide a base from which new prosperity can be maintained.

This is particularly important considering circumstances where we're relying on things like gaming revenue. The relatively high profit margins we're seeing now with this competitive model might not continue if competitors start offering free entry in every one of their locations. The gaming market here in the United States has become more saturated over time, so there's more competition. If you have gaming profits and want to think about ways to invest those in diversification, that's foremost on many tribal developers’ minds these days.

What are some examples of effective tribal governance and stewardship in the U.S today and key learnings you have drawn from these observations?

There are 574 federally recognised tribes and many other non-federally recognised native groups, so it's hard to provide a single answer. There are some lessons we draw from a native context, but also sometimes these are just human problems tribes are figuring out how to solve. Let me give you an example, you’re in a poor community and you have a lot of individuals who are unemployed. If you're poor and unemployed in a spread-out place like the United States or Australia, transportation is nearly always a necessary component of getting to work. You can't address your own individual poverty and your family's needs if you can't get to work. There are tribes here who have identified this as a mundane, but important, thing, and they’ve decided to figure out how to get people to work. They’ve said, “let’s figure out how to set up a regional transportation system so people can have reliable bus services.” If you expand this beyond tribal or reservation boundaries, you are now a tribal community practicing good governance on territory that is technically not even yours in a community minded way. Of course, you're not limiting the bus service to only your tribal citizenry; anybody who needs a dependable ride to work knows the bus is going to come on time. This involves all those foundational concepts, public minded leadership, a commitment of your resources and efforts that do not only help your community but help everyone in the broader region. Setting up capable institutions for running a transportation department is not an easy thing.

But guess what that does for families who now have someone working every day? Suddenly their household has a meal on the table every night, so their cousins are less hungry, and their little nieces and nephews go to school the next day and are able to learn better.

Tiny acts of good governance have tremendous ripple effects, and it's even better when you don't confine it to just your people and tribal citizenry. Think of the COVID pandemic, at least here in the United States, at first vaccines were limited. However, tribal nations were fortunate to be able to get their hands on relatively generous allocations of vaccines early on. There are numerous stories of tribes throwing their doors open to everyone in the community. The Chickasaw Nation said, “if you would like to be vaccinated, please come see us, it's free and we have thought of a great system to get people vaccinated without exposing them to others. You don't have to be a citizen of my tribe to come get vaccinated, many of you around us work in our enterprises or are our friends and neighbours. You're a part of our churches, and in the spirit of the Lord come here and let us take on this tremendous malady that has fallen upon us all together.” I live far from Oklahoma where the Chickasaw Nation is headquartered, but there is also the Mashpee tribe right down on the south shore within driving distance of my own home South of Boston. Their Indian Health Service Centre had vaccinations when I couldn't get one through my own non-native medical system in the city, so I was able to go get a vaccine several months earlier than I would have otherwise, which was important because my close family had children and one older person at that point in time. That community outreach for everyone is a result of excellent tribal governance. It was incredibly important to me; my family was thrilled when I was the first one to be vaccinated.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

The tribal nations and those who work with them including non-profits who are native led have increased their efforts to address the most vexing problems. We have a tremendous issue, and I suspect native Australia does as well, with murdered and missing Indigenous people (women in particular). This is not exclusively women, but unfortunately the reality of humankind is often those who are the mildest, most downtrodden, least populous, or weakest in physicality or numbers are at risk. Because you're lesbian, gay, transsexual, or if your skin colour is a different tone, crimes against you have been historically under prosecuted. Layer on issues here in the United States with land jurisdiction questions and how policing authorities might have a larger say in particular places, those problems are terrible and difficult to overcome. The degree to which these problems have fallen upon the meekest in our communities is helping raise the idea amongst tribes that we need to take care of this, because no outside body is going to be able to devote the level of care required. It’s easier for someone who is not part of us to dismiss these issues as anomalies. They might even think because it's a small community without a big voting block they can ignore their trials and tribulations. Several tribes here are trying to take these issues on, and not just tribes, but journalists, media people, state departments, and non-profits fall in that category also. How do you overcome these problems? We have what I think of as three institutions which people leave but struggle to reintegrate into their communities after being in. These are prison, mental health care facilities, and drug treatment centres. If you come out of drug, behavioural or mental health issues which have institutionalised you, housing stability is a problem. You can layer this problem with how native communities have a lack of access to housing and the level of upkeep on housing stock is deplorable in many places. Even in places where there's not that much overt homelessness, there's often an under-housing crisis where multiple people live in too few square feet. If you come out of an institution and you have a troubled past, some of which carries with you into the job market, you’ve been institutionalised. You don't have a job, maybe you've lost your driver's license (which gets back to that transportation problem) and even if you have a couple of weeks in a halfway house, it is not long enough to organise anything. You need a permanent address and to put together something which looks like a job application. If you land with $0 in your pocket, when that two-week period ends you have nothing. You end up basically on the street, and being on the street with no prospects and stability often lands you in jail, regardless of which of those three institutions you came out of. If you were in jail, you end up back in jail. If you had problems with drugs or mental health care, even though you did not commit what many people would consider to be a crime, you end up in jail because we have a lack of social services to take you in. You have this tremendous problem which does not solely stem from under housing, but it can be addressed substantially by housing stability. There are plenty of tribal non-profits and government’s discussing how to address this issue. Is there a way they can provide tiny homes for people to live in, not just for two weeks but what about instead an open-ended arrangement, where if you're on track and the community wants to reintegrate you can take away all that stress and any chance of falling back into trouble.

If you’re in a small community, they don't have enough people to just flush anyone away. You might've made bad choices or caused harm to those around you. You might have put yourself in dire situations, but if we can help you reintegrate and regenerate your connections in the community, we can't afford to lose you.

I'm from Texas originally, and Texas has a big population and punitive criminal justice system. Maybe it is the case that in Texas you can just say, "you screwed up and if you can't figure out how to get yourself back on the right track that’s on you." But go talk to some smaller communities, native communities where there's only a thousand of us. We can't afford to just flush someone down the drain (even if they made bad choices). If they're willing to reintegrate and rejoin us as a constructive member of our community, why can’t we highly prioritise that as something we should spend our limited resources and efforts on? Some of the issue involves housing people who aren't fully able to pay their own way. Lumping a bunch of people together in a poor area and thinking you have provided housing so they should now be able to sort out their lives because they have a roof over their heads doesn't make sense. My experience with native communities who are taking this on is it's much more about how we can build a community which is much more than just a place, so you won't have to sleep in the cold on the street tonight. How can we provide a community that is enabling and reinforcing your inner nature to rejoin us as a community? Being in a dire situation and having a roof over your head is arguably better than being in a dire situation and not having any place, but just having a place to land that will keep you from freezing to death on the streets overnight still does not set you up well for the next day. How are you going to take on the paperwork that's necessary to re-establish your driver's license so that if you do manage to get an appointment with the community development office you can be there? If someone gives you an interview, how are you going to get there on a short-term housing grant that's going to keep you for a couple weeks and then leave you and your children out on the street again? We need longer term thought processes about how we can provide stability and wraparound services to connect people back to the labour market and school systems for their children.

There's so much required it's overwhelming. if you've been institutionalised, you are not able to deal with those ancillary things many people just have fall in place around them, because they're in the job market and have a car or bus pass to get to work.

There are so many things you don't necessarily think about unless you sit down with a tribe or a non-profit that works in these spaces. A roof over your head is great, but we need to think about the other things that go with this. My class has worked this year and last with a non-profit at one of the tribes here in the United States. They use a peer-to-peer mentorship model, and in addition to all those things we're talking about, they want you to have someone who's been in your situation and is on the right side of their own recovery so you have someone to lend you an ear. This is for if you're newly out of an institutional setting and you just need someone who understands the many challenges reintegration brings every day.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

At least in my own reading I like nonfiction that makes you care about real characters and people who are out there. I have a 12-year-old and we occasionally do story night, but this is not with children's books. We're doing these story nights where I read aloud from native focused books. One book that's older which listeners maybe aren't familiar with is called Counting Coup. It's from 2001, it focuses on a particular high school basketball player, a girl at the Crow Reservation of Montana. It's her story about how even if you've got these great physical talents, they come with difficulties if you're in an environment that's tough and you have family problems. Then you also bring upon yourself these tremendous community expectations because of your physical abilities. It's a story mostly focused on this one girl, but also about the whole team around her and how a season in a high school basketball setting can play out on a tribal reservation when it's set in a poor and small remote community. One book that is much more recent we've only just started is called Valley of the Birdtail. It’s set in a native community in Canada, and there’s a non-native community on one side of the river in this beautiful valley. The Birdtail River separates that town from a native town, and it's obvious even from the start how tremendously different the outcomes are based on which side of the river you were born on and your ethnicity. It’s focusing on a slightly older man from the non-Indigenous community who drives across the river every day to teach, and a native girl who must go across the river to the non-native side to attend high school because there's no high school in the native community. I'm already interested in this book; it was published a couple years ago. One of the authors is a student at our law school this year, and he's a lawyer himself already. In terms of a book people are probably much more familiar with is Killers of the Flower Moon, which was published in 2017 about the Osage nation and a series of murders that took place in the 1920s. These murders centred around the oil production that was happening there and the vast wealth and mineral resources spinning off from it. Even if you've never heard of the book, in October of last year a major Hollywood motion picture told the story. It was directed by Martin Scorsese and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone. It is a tremendous movie which has gotten quite a lot of buzz here in the U.S and among the native community. The community at Osage reached out to the filmmakers and said, "we hear you're going to tell a story about us, maybe you should talk to us.” The people behind the movie took them up on this offer and went to Grey Horse, Oklahoma. They came with open ears, minds and hearts which fundamentally changed the film to tell the story more from the Osage point of view; I'm not sure this would have happened decades ago.