Winner Of The Margaret Mead 2001 Awards

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Pw

AIO'S AMBASSADORS PROGRAM

If Margaret Mead were alive today, the Ambassadors Program of Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) would be a favorite of hers. AIO's staff has remained small (six to seven). Rather than consolidate and fatten itself, AIO has chosen to spawn "children." It has nurtured individuals--especially in its Ambassadors Program--and fledgling organizations, and sent them out into their own communities to navigate among the pressures and pleasures of modern Native American life. "Our principal talent," says Laura Harris, executive vice president, "is the ability to identify needs in the community, bring in experts to talk with that community, and facilitate or contribute solutions."

AIO never loses sight of its roots. Founder LaDonna Harris, Comanche, is the daughter of an Eagle Medicine Man father and a devout Christian mother. Her daughter Laura attends classes in Comanche once a week. AIO reflects tradition, passing along a love of kinship, tolerance, and tribal wisdom from generation to generation. But it is not nostalgic or sentimental. Even the name, "Americans" for Indian Opportunity, bespeaks an acceptance of the here-and-now, the desire to work with the world as it is.

AIO's brilliance comes from seeing what issues face native communities, and both generously helping and learning from those communities as they adapt to the postmodern dilemmas of a globalized culture. When, for instance, in the 1970s, oil shortages sent the West into deprivation anxiety, AIO opened an inquiry into the shortages' potential effects on tribal America ... only to realize that, in the words of Laura Harris, "Well, hell, we OWN a huge proportion of the nation's energy reserves." AIO then asked: If tribal governments owned so many resources, why were they so poor? It turned out that the Department of Interior had entered the tribes into completely unprofitable and harmful deals. So AIO brought together tribal leaders, energy experts, and staff from the newly formed Department of Energy to catalyze a new collective wisdom about the future of energy resources in Indian Country. But AIO did not become the energy consultant. Instead, it helped start what is now the the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, known informally as the Indian OPEC.

The Ambassadors Program

The Native American Housing Council, the National Tribal Environment Council, the Laguna Education Foundation, the Tribal Association on Solid Waste and Emergency Response, the California Land Office, and the Daughters of the Pueblo Revolt all owe their genesis to AIO. But the recent centerpiece has been the Ambassadors Program to foster leadership, launched in 1993, which now has 122 program "graduates." It is the only leadership training program to weave traditional tribal values with contemporary reality. Each Ambassador serves for a year, working on his or her community project and meeting with other Ambassadors, for a week, four times during the year. Ivan Posey (Eastern Shoshone), for instance, did his Ambassador work on suicides among his people. He began to work for the Forest Service and, taking his leadership training to heart, ran for and won a seat on the tribal council. Rebecca Alegria's project under AIO was to find old photographs of Menominee life. She not only found photos but discovered their importance to a lawsuit for reparations for timber harvests. She's now a tribal researcher for Menominee historic preservation.

One of the four yearly Ambassadors meetings occurs in another nation (Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela) and expands the sometimes-held parochial view that Indians with deep and important values live just in the American West. Their meetings aren't "development." They're learning programs, philosophical exchanges with often remarkable communities. "The Mayans of Guatemala," for example, say the Harrises, "are extraordinarily well organized when it comes to publishing their literature in their own language"; something the North American Indian community sorely lacks. Antigua has remarkable political activism and structure, a model "self-advocating" culture. So AIO travels, not to change or repair what it finds, but to share values and absorb, absorb, absorb. "All Native Americans fall prey to occasional myopia," Laura Harris says candidly; inevitably, though, the young Ambassadors come back "re-wired," eager to change the domestic climate, and broader-minded about a native world far larger than their tribes.

Once you start listing AIO projects, it's hard to stop. "Mom's always having a vision," says Laura. "What's coming down the pike? How can we get ahead of it--about twenty years ahead?" Recently, a graduate of the Ambassadors Program explained to AIO how Europeans desired Native American arts and fine crafts. The trouble was that middlemen made most of the profit. Immediately, AIO met with its advisors and board and helped jump-start the Native Arts Alliance. They guided the Alliance through the nonprofit-status paperwork and IRS red tape. The Arts Alliance has begun to cut out the middlemen and sell directly to overseas markets. It is just one more child of AIO with a strong life of its own, a realistic view of the globalocal economy, and great benefit to native artists.