The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe’s Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways received an Honoring Nations award from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.
“These governments were not very sophisticated and were often unwieldy, with no provisions for court systems. These systems usually hampered efforts to get things done,” says Dr. Stephen Cornell, faculty chairman of the University of Arizona’s Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy.
The old governments also carry a legacy of colonialism that creates distrust in leadership and fosters economic dependence, Cornell says. As one tribal leader told Cornell, “We’re trying to replace the victim attitude with the victor attitude.”
NNI’s new online education course seeks to help tribal leaders do just that. The Institute has created an eight-course series entitled “Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development” and designed to strengthen and improve the operations of American and Canadian Indian nations.
Rebuilding Native Nations
The NNI course includes nine learning modules presenting information in the form of video lectures by course instructors and perspectives of more than 100 Indian leaders and scholars, including Frank Ettawageshik of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians; David Gipp of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the president of United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota; and the late Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010) of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, who was the first female to be elected Principal Chief.
