The Paradox of Tribal Community Building: The Roots of Local Resistance to Tribal Statecraft

UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY-BUILDING AGENDAS

When I was asked to do a talk on our Indigenous perspectives and experiences on community building for the 14^th Viola F. Cordova Memorial Symposium, I was very excited to hear the voices of women who talked about their community-building experiences. I recognize that many Indigenous academics do the hard intellectual and emotional labor of community work, returning to our tribal nations to use our skills, knowledge, and networks to create opportunities and possibilities for our people. Our aspiration is that as we work alongside our communities, we take part in their critical consciousness of change and action. The consciousness of change is rooted in our oral stories, while the consciousness of action is rooted in our prayers and songs. This consciousness motivates and drives our families "to go and do more." As an academic, I am careful about working with my community and to be cognizant of my actions and words.

This article is contextualized within the framework of this selfawareness as I discuss the dilemma confronting community building by capturing the many voices and differing perspectives on how to achieve a goal. Within the realm of community work, community members' and tribal leaders' agendas often collide and contradict each other. Agendas usually come from the "top," meaning tribal leaders view their agenda as working for the entire nation, embracing the needs and expectations of all local communities. Agendas that come from the "bottom" are from local communities, who view their work as meeting their own local needs. Ultimately, community building becomes a complex path of relationship building, resource building, and agenda setting amid power relationships—all moving toward fulfillment of the ultimate goal of improving the lives of Indigenous peoples. This study is an effort to understand this dilemma through the research question, "What are the differing indicators of local community goals compared to tribal nation goals? Do local community goals differ from those of tribal nation goals"?

I address this dilemma by focusing on Native peoples' participation within community building through a federally funded grant program. Specifically, I examine a federal grant program intended to build capacity for tribal nations that are working to improve their tribal educational programs. I focus specifically on the language used in the grant programs for goal setting. Because of a lack of access to final reports, this study focuses strictly on the grant language used to construct goals for their tribal nation and/or local communities. What I'm detecting in this research is the social construction used by the tribal nations and local communities to reflect their respective concerns. The reason I solely address a goals analysis is to capture how a handful of tribes imagine its nation and community, central and local spaces, and detect who has the authority and power to deploy these goals.

Before continuing, I believe it is necessary to clarify the meaning of goals, which implies the intended consequence of planned decisionmaking and action. When considering the realm of Indigenous thought, it is important to trace meaning from our community's understanding of its own oral history. I begin with a creation narrative that illustrates how Indigenous peoples are active agents of goal setting, planning, and action. From there, I link the story to my literature review, provide a background of the grant program, describe my methodology, deliver the research findings, identify a new theory of a method of inquiry, and end with my conclusions.

In the Navajo origin story, the Holy People and Changing Woman took thoughtful, deliberate, and purposeful actions to create a balanced and harmonious world. They strengthened the bonds of k'é (relationship) to resist chaos (confusion). They sought to address the apparent disrespectful behavior of the Air Spirit people. As the story goes, the Air Spirit people's unruly movement through the four worlds created disorder. The other worldly beings, Tééhoołtsódii (the one that grabs things in the water), Táłtłááh álééh (blue heron), Ch'ał (frog), Ii'ni' jiłgaii (Winter thunder), Swallow people, and Yellow Grasshopper people...