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Tex G. Hall, president of The National Council of American Indians
"Pay attention and learn as much as you
can, because someday you may have to lead your people," Tex G. Hall's
grandfather told him when he was a little boy. His grandfather was a
cattle rancher on the Fort Berthold Reservation, in North Dakota, the home
of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, American Indian tribes that joined as
the Three Affiliated Tribes in the mid-1800s; from 1958, when Hall was two
years old, to 1962, the older man also held the post of chairman of the
reservation's Tribal Council. In 1998 Hall, a former high-school teacher,
principal, and school superintendent, was elected to the same position,
and in 2002 he became the first chairman of the council to win reelection.
Concurrently, beginning in 2001, Hall has served as president of the
National Congress of American Indians (NCAI); the country's oldest and
largest American Indian advocacy group, the NCAI represents more than 200
of the 562 Native American tribes in the continental U.S. and Alaska. In
dozens of appearances before congressional committees and in many other
venues, Hall has described the huge problems with which Native Americans
have been grappling for many decades: inadequate housing; widespread lack
of basic utilities; badly maintained roads; deteriorating schools;
extremely high rates of unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse,
crime, mental illness, and physical disease; discrimination in employment,
housing, the issuing of credit, and other areas; and the many
ramifications of unfair treatment and mismanagement by the Bureau of
Indian Affairs and other federal and state agencies. "Unfortunately, the
first Americans have been the forgotten Americans," Hall told Judy
Sarasohn for the Washington Post (October 28, 2004). In announcing that
the NCAI hoped to raise $12 million to buy its own building in Washington,
D.C., where it currently rents space for its headquarters, Hall expressed
the hope, as Sarasohn wrote, "that a higher visibility in Washington and
increased lobbying, combined with a strong voter registration effort will
help Native Americans better hold lawmakers and administration officials
accountable for their Indian trust responsibilities."
One of the eight children of Leland and
Audrey (Rabbithead) Hall, Tex Gerald Hall was born on September 18, 1956;
he is of Mandan and Arikara ancestry. His Indian name, Ihbudah Hishi,
means Red-Tipped Arrow. Hall grew up with his three brothers and four
sisters on the family’s cattle ranch on the Fort Berthold Reservation,
located on the Missouri River in western North Dakota. According to a
brief history on the Three Affiliated Tribes' Web site (mnanation.com),
although the tribes have shared "cultures and histories" for many decades,
each maintains its distinct clan relationships and ceremonies. As
described on the Web sites of the Fargo/Grand Forks, North Dakota,
newspaper the Forum and the Mni Sose Intertribal Water Rights Coalition
(mnisose.org), the reservation is a small fraction of its original size,
as delineated in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. The federal government
succeeded in shrinking its boundaries even before the discovery, two
decades later, that Congress had never ratified the treaty, and
subsequently, a series of executive orders, foreclosures, homestead acts,
and other measures steadily reduced its total area. Individual members of
the Mandan, Hidatsa, or Arikara tribes own 378,604 acres, or about 38
percent, of the reservation's 988,000 acres; another 8 percent, or 79,233
acres, is owned by the Three Affiliated Tribes and is managed jointly by
the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and the tribal government. More than
half of the remaining land is owned by non-Indians. Moreover, according to
mnisose.org, in the 1940s the federal government in effect usurped 155,000
acres of "prime agricultural land" in the reservation as a consequence of
its building the Garrison Dam, which created a reservoir, called Lake
Sakakawea. "The reservoir . . . divided the reservation into five
segments. . . . Communication between those segments is difficult because
only one bridge at the northern end of the reservation crosses the lake.
Central transportation is nonexistent. To reach the southern segment, one
must travel over 100 miles around the lake. The overall infrastructure
that was to replace the old fell short of tribal expectations and
federal-tribal agreements." Of the approximately 8,400 individuals who are
enrolled members of the Mandan, Hidatsa, or Arikara tribes, about 3,775
live on the reservation. The unemployment rate on the reservation in
recent years has been as high as 50 percent. The majority of those who
have jobs work for the tribal government, Fort Berthold Community College,
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, or the Four Bears
Casino and Lodge, which opened in 1993.
Hall's father, who also served for a while
as a member of the Tribal Council, earned barely enough to support his
large family. Each year, according to a National Indian Gaming Association
(NIGA) press release (August 27, 2003, on-line), Hall and his brothers
each had to make do with only two pairs of overalls--one for wearing to
school and the other for working on the ranch. Hall attended a boarding
school outside the reservation whose students were both whites and Native
Americans. His father, who emphasized to him and his siblings the
importance of a good education, "told Hall that he would have to study
hard and compete with the non-Indians in their own arena," according to
the NIGA press release. The release added, "Hall said that he had been
following his father's advice--to be a fighter--all his life." When Hall
graduated from high school, in the mid-1970s, fewer than 40 percent of
Native Americans earned high-school diplomas. He then enrolled at the
University of Mary, in Bismarck, North Dakota, where he earned a B.A.
degree in 1979; at that time, only 8 percent of Native Americans had
completed college. (In 2000, almost 12 percent of Native Americans were
college graduates; for the population of the U.S. as a whole, the figure
was 24 percent.) In about 1980 Hall earned an M.A. degree in educational
administration from the University of South Dakota, in Vermillion. He
spent the next few years teaching at the high-school level and coaching
basketball. In 1985 he became the principal of the Mandaree middle school
and high school, in a town on the Fort Berthold Reservation; the students
were mostly Hidatsas. He served as superintendent of the Mandaree school
system from 1994 to 1996. In 1995 the North Dakota Indian Education
Association named him the North Dakota Indian Educator of the Year.
In 1996 Hall won a seat on the Tribal
Council (also known as the Tribal Business Council). Somewhat analogous to
a state legislature, the council consists of the chairman, who is the
administrative head of the tribe and represents all members of the Three
Affiliated Tribes, and six councilors, each of whom represents a different
segment of the reservation. Three of the members serve as the vice
chairman, the secretary, and the treasurer of the council, respectively.
Hall served as a councilman until 1998, when he became the first council
member to be elected chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes in the middle
of a term. Since Hall had to vacate his council seat, and the tribal
constitution requires all council seats to be filled, the council voted
for a replacement for him. To break a three–three tie, he voted twice,
once as chairman and once as regular member. His action proved highly
controversial, but he prevailed. He also denied, and surmounted,
accusations that he had won the chairmanship by paying for votes. In 2002
Hall was elected to a second term as chairman.
As a councilman, Hall chaired a meeting on
Indian treaty issues held in 1999 at the White House with President Bill
Clinton and representatives of the Great Plains Tribes. In response to
that meeting and others, in November 2000 President Clinton issued an
executive order for the purpose of "ensur[ing] that all Executive
departments and agencies consult with Indian tribes and respect tribal
sovereignty as they develop policy on issues that impact Indian
communities." (As Hall's public statements indicate, that goal has not yet
been met.) Also in 1999 Hall chaired the National Steering Committee for
the Reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (IHCIA) of
1976, which had been reauthorized four times and was scheduled to expire
in 2000. In presenting its findings, the committee noted that "the unmet
health needs of the American Indian people remain alarmingly severe, . . .
and the health status of Indians is far below the health status of the
general population of the United States." The committee reported that the
death rate of American Indians from pneumonia and flu was 71 percent
higher than the rate for the U.S. population as a whole; for diabetes, it
was 249 percent higher; for tuberculosis, 533 percent higher; and from
alcoholism, 627 percent higher. As Hall noted on February 3, 2005 in his
2005 State of the Indian Nations Address, presented at the National Press
Club, in Washington, D.C., Congress has still not reauthorized the IHCIA.
Currently, he reported, the federal government spends less per capita for
health care for Native Americans than it does for federal prisoners, and
one-third less per capita than what is spent for the average recipient of
Medicaid.
Hall instituted the annual State of the
Indian Nations Address in January 2003, as president of the National
Congress of American Indians (NCAI). He was elected to that position in
November 2001 (he had failed in his first try for the job, in 1999), and
was reelected two years later. In his 2003 address, as transcribed on
ncai.org, Hall focused on three of his main concerns. The first was
threats to the survival of Indian tribes as, in his words, "independent,
self-governing peoples," the main threats emanating from injustices
perpetuated by the federal government. One glaring example is that tribes
do not have legal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit crimes on
reservations. Tribal police thus have no power to detain, say, a
non-Indian who is caught driving while intoxicated or even a non-Indian
who is suspected of rape. "Jurisdictional confusion," according to Hall,
is "perhaps the number one issue facing tribes today." Another pertains to
so-called trust responsibility. As Hall explained in his address, when the
federal government confiscated Indian lands, "the U.S. gave its solemn
promise to protect the rights of tribes to govern themselves, and to
provide for the health, education, and well-being of tribes. That
commitment, the ‘trust responsibility,' is not a hand-out, but a
contract--and that contract has been broken time and again by the federal
government." In particular, the federal government has failed in its
duties as the manager of trust money--royalties from mining, grazing, oil
drilling, and other activities on Indian lands--that it has collected
since the late 19th century and that are supposed to be distributed to
individual Indians and tribes. "The system is such a mess that independent
estimates suggest that billions of dollars that belong to individual
Indian people and Indian tribes have been lost by the federal government,"
Hall said. Moreover, unlike the millions of Social Security checks that
arrive in people's mailboxes or bank accounts according to a strict
monthly schedule, Indian trust-account checks are often months late. Past
efforts to fix the system have failed, Hall charged, because the proposed
reforms "lacked accountability--clear standards, measurable performance
goals, oversight by an independent body with power to act when those
standards are not met." The problem cannot be corrected, he warned, if
attempts to do so by members of the federal executive and legislative
branches do not include tribal leaders as equal partners. (In June 1996 a
class-action lawsuit was filed to force the federal government to account
for the missing money and to permanently reform the system. Known as
Cobell v. Norton, for Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in
Montana, and Gale Norton, the U.S. secretary of the interior, the case has
not yet been resolved.)
Hall's second main concern, in his words,
was "the need to move out of a century of poverty and unemployment toward
meaningful development in our economies." "With more than a quarter of
Indian people living in poverty, and unemployment rates on reservations
more than double the population at large--13.6% on average, and over 80%
in some communities--there is no group of people with a more urgent
economic crisis than American Indians," he said. Moreover, neither the
president nor Congress had "addresse[d] the need that exists in Indian
Country for sustainable, comprehensive economic development." The creation
of 100,000 new jobs by 2010, with the ultimate goal of producing tribal
self-sufficiency by 2020, would remain illusory if, in the coming years,
more than 14 percent of Native American households still had no access to
electricity, nearly 24 percent still had no telephone service, and more
than a third still had no indoor plumbing; if most roads on reservations
remained unpaved, so that in heavy rains or snows, they became impassable;
if there still were too few or no ways to "transport the employees,
customers, and goods that fuel healthy economies." Moreover, Hall
explained, "traditional sources of capital such as lending, banking, and
bonding are all but nonexistent on reservations," and the federal
bureaucracy has compounded the difficulties of would-be property owners.
He himself, he said, had been waiting for two years for the Bureau of
Indian Affairs to clear the title on 40 acres he had bought to expand his
family's ranch. According to Hall, in 40 percent of homes in tribal
communities, overcrowding and "serious physical deficiencies" made living
conditions unacceptable; the comparable figure for the whole of the U.S.
was 5.9 percent.
Hall's third major concern, as expressed in
his 2003 State of the Indian Nations Address, was "well being and quality
of life" in the realms of health, education, environmental protection, and
homeland security. In illustrating the extent of deficiencies in those
areas in the Indian nations, Hall noted that the dollar amount that the
Bureau of Indian Affairs allotted per child in reservation schools was
half the average amount allotted per child in public schools elsewhere in
the U.S.; in some reservation high schools, the dropout rate was 90
percent; in some communities, the cost of maintaining schoolbuses was far
greater than the amount budgeted, because of the wear and tear caused by
traveling over badly maintained, rutted roads; members of at least 170
tribes lived within 50 miles of sites that the Environmental Protection
Agency had classified as highly toxic; and the federal government had
allocated no funds at all for homeland security on reservations, despite
their international borders (a total of 260 miles) and the presence of
dams and hydroelectric facilities and oil and natural-gas pipelines.
In his 2005 State of the Indian Nations
Address, Hall reported that the poverty rate among Native Americans had
dropped by 7 percent and that average income had increased by 33 percent.
He also announced that record numbers of Indians had voted in the 2004
elections. Otherwise, little had changed, and some problems had worsened.
In its 2005 budget, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had cut funds for school
construction by 10 percent. Allocations for housing were smaller than they
had been in five years. The Indian Tribal Justice Act of 1993, which
called for additional financing of tribal court systems, had never been
funded; indeed, the amounts allocated for tribal courts had actually
decreased since its passage. The incidences of alcoholism, drug abuse,
mental illness, and diabetes and other serious illnesses remained the
highest in the U.S.; the traffic-fatality rate remained four times the
national average. Once again, Hall called on Congress and the president to
reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.
In his other role, that of chairman of the
Three Affiliated Tribes, Hall was instrumental in acquiring funds for a
new bridge, a water project, a cultural center, a juvenile-justice
facility, a health-technology task force, and the Intertribal Economic
Alliance, an organization of tribal leaders that urges the launching of
programs to promote economic development on reservations. According to the
Institute for Tribal Government (on-line), by 2003 he had helped to create
300 new jobs on the Fort Berthold Reservation and had seen the
unemployment rate there shrink from 50 percent to under 15 percent. Hall
has pushed for the construction of an $81 million oil refinery on the Fort
Berthold Reservation. The refinery would be the first such plant to be
owned by American Indians. Using wind as one source of energy, it would
produce propane, butane, gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel fuel. To date, the
Department of Commerce has allocated $1.3 million and the Bureau of Indian
Affairs $500,000 toward its construction. Although its design has been
touted as "environmentally friendly," and Hall and others have emphasized
its benefits as a potential employer of hundreds of people, some
reservation residents have expressed the fear that pollution from the
refinery would compound the many health problems endemic among members of
their tribes.
Hall is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in
education. His professional activities have included his unpaid service as
secretary and treasurer of the United Tribes Technical College and
chairman of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association, the Native
American Bank Corp., and the 2004 Native American Basketball Invitational.
In 1999 he was inducted into the North Dakota Sports College Hall of Fame,
for his achievements as a high-school basketball player and his
establishment of Tex Hall basketball camps in the U.S. and Canada. In 2002
he won the University of Mary Leadership Award, for his work as an
educator. Hall plays basketball for the North Dakota Warriors, a team in
an American Indian league. He lives and raises cattle on his family’s
ranch on the Fort Berthold Reservation.
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