The Heartland Center for Leadership Development is pleased to announce its new Leadership Development and Board Effectiveness series. These five webinars on developing community leadership and building board member capacity will begin in June and conclude in October, 2010. Each webinar will be designed to provide interaction, discussion and feedback. Webinar participants will receive a packet of downloadable training materials that include session powerpoints and readings. Registrants will also be able to view the webinar via recording, so you can refresh your learning experience at any time. Webinars will last 60 minutes and will be hosted by an experienced team of Heartland Center trainers. This summer's topics include:

* Leadership Styles and Practices: Learn what it means to be an effective leader. Assess your own leadership strengths and aspirations and create an action plan for building new skills and practices.

* Working with Groups: Managing effective meetings may seem simple, yet it's often a challenging job for community development practitioners, whose role includes leading diverse groups to consensus and beyond.

* Engaging the Community: Outlines practical strategies for strengthening your organization through community participation and volunteerism. Once a project is off the ground and you have enough people engaged, this session will also help you maintain momentum.

* Stewardship Essentials: Explains the essential concepts of board stewardship and how stewardship applies to the board's role in interpreting and updating an organization's mission, strategy development, evaluation, resource development and being an effective emissary.

* Governance Effectiveness: Provides an introduction to tools, techniques and processes that effective boards use to plan and manage their meetings, document their decision-making, successfully navigate conflict, recruit and orient new members to board service. The webinar will also help clarify the dual governance roles of staff and board for developing organizational strategies and documenting progress.

Each webinar will start at 12:00 p.m. (Central) and end at 1:00 p.m. The training team includes Milan Wall, Vicki Luther and Kurt Mantonya from the Heartland Center staff and Gordon Goodwin, a former Heartland Center board member with expertise in building board capacity. The cost of each webinar is $59.99, or purchase the entire webinar series at one time for is $250.00, a savings of $49.99. Each registration entitles a single user to have more than one person attend at their computer in one site. Additional registrations from the same organization will be treated as another single registration.

For more details and registration information about this exciting webinar series, please visit the Heartland Center's webinar page. You can also contact Kurt Mantonya for additional information.

Federally Recognized Tribes

Here is the third encyclopedia entry I authored from Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty, Donald Fixico, ed.

Federally recognized tribes are those tribes that share a relationship with the U.S. government either through treaty or through congressional legislation. According to international law and treaty, the U.S. government is supposed to protect the tribal lands and tribal resources of federally recognized tribes. Under the same obligation, it is to provide them federal assistance with health care, education, and economic development (O’Brien 1989, 90). These tribes must have officially been recognized by the federal government. The period of self-determination (1968-present) has seen a dramatic shift in legislative policy and attitude toward Indian country evidenced by the passing of acts developed to foster and stimulate economic development in reservation communities. Examples of these acts include the Indian Financing Act and the Native American Programs Act, which establish a revolving line of credit; the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which allows tribes the opportunity to conduct gaming; and the Indian Tribal Government Tax Status Act, which allows tribes to utilize the tax advantages enjoyed by states and to raise money for governmental programs. Unrecognized tribes, frustrated because these benefits are not reaching their communities, petition to become federally recognized. Of the more than 600 tribes to date, 562 tribes are federally recognized. The federal government classifies tribes into four categories: (1) federally recognized tribes, (2) unrecognized tribes, (3) tribes that have been terminated, and (4) tribes recognized by states. More than two hundred tribes are not recognized by the federal government because of termination, have never been formally recognized via treaty or other legislation, or have been decimated by war and disease. Many of these tribes are currently seeking formal recognition in order to receive federal assistance, but tribes that were terminated cannot seek recognition.

The current process, known as the Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP) was initiated by Congress on October 2, 1978. The secretary of the interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) set forth ethnohistorical, genealogical, anthropological, geographical, and legislative requirements that petitioners must meet to be recognized. A group must be able to prove that it meets these criteria:
(1) The group can be identified by historical evidence, written or oral, as being an American Indian Tribe; (2) its members are descendants of an Indian Tribe that inhabited a specific area, and these members continue to inhabit a specific area in a community viewed as American Indian and distinct from other populations in the area; (3) the Indian group has maintained governmental authority over its members as an autonomous entity throughout history until the present; (4) the membership of the group is composed principally of persons who are not members of any other Indian tribe; and (5) the tribe has not been the subject of congressional legislation expressly terminating their relationship with the federal government. (Pevar 1992, 262)

Many tribes cannot seek recognition because of the fifth clause, termination; but there are other means, beyond the recognition guidelines, that a tribe can pursue, such as Department of the Interior administrative decisions and congressional legislation.

To date, several hundred groups are seeking federal recognition through the Federal Acknowledgment Process by meeting the requirements and submitting to review by the Department of the Interior. The process is costly, more than $250,000 per case. The benefits of reestablishing the relationship between government and tribe are immense. Not only is the tribe eligible for welfare, health care, education, and other federal assistance, but the tribe can enter into and negotiate casino gaming compacts if the state in which it is located allows this form of gaming. Indian gaming is a multibillion-dollar business that has benefited the tribes that operate casinos.

Kurt T. Mantonya

See also
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831; Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP); Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 1988; Termination.

References and Further Reading
O’Brien, Sharon. 1989. American Indian Tribal Governments. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Prevar, Stephen L. 1992. An American Civil Liberties Union Handbook: The Rights of Indians and Tribes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. 2002. Testimony Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, U.S. Senate. Indian Issues: Basis for BIA’s Tribal Recognition Decisions Is Not Always Clear. Statement of Barry T. Hill, Director, Natural Resources and Environment. Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office.