A Land Whose Future Is Ours

It’s amazing how much we carry out of childhood. Not just the facts — the habits. The songs we still hum in our head, what we do for breakfast, how we show respect to others. Whole cultures are really just bundles of shared habits, passed hand to hand until no one remembers learning them. In this country we have a habit of believing in the Constitution — in the division of powers, in the idea that no one person rules. We treat it as though it began in Philadelphia in 1787. But I learned as a boy that it didn’t begin there. And I remember thinking: why don’t they teach this in school? Long before “We the People,” on this same ground, six nations — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and later the Tuscarora — bound themselves together under an oral constitution called the Great Law of Peace, the Gayanashagowa. A Grand Council. A division of powers. A way to decide great things together while each nation still governed its own home. It is older than the United States by centuries, and it was admired openly by the men who built this republic — Benjamin Franklin among them. In 1988, Congress itself passed a resolution formally acknowledging the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s contribution to the Constitution. Historians still argue about how much the framers borrowed. They do not argue about who was here first, governing themselves brilliantly, while Europe was brainwashed to believe such a thing was impossible for “savages.” And here is the part that never left me. Their genius wasn’t only in how they governed. It was in how they shared. They ran an economy on it. The land was not owned; it was held in trust for everyone, stewarded by the clan mothers, farmed by families but returned to the people if it went unused. When the harvest came in — the corn, the beans, the squash — it was distributed by need: the children and the elders first, then everyone else. Surplus went into a common storehouse against the hard winter. And a person’s standing in the village was measured not by what he kept, but by what he gave away. European visitors kept noticing the same startling thing: the chiefs were often the poorest people in the village — because a leader was expected to give the most. They had a phrase for what leadership costs. We might call it the poverty of the powerful. This was the Haudenosaunee’s way — not one law binding every nation on this continent, for the peoples here were as different from one another as Europe’s were. But the instinct beneath it — that you measure a leader by what he gives away — echoed among many of them, each in their own words.

It’s an important part of America’s history that we all should know and share. A spark in history that continues to this day. I grew up in an Oklahoma that outsiders would have called third-worldish — and the poorest people I knew, the tribal families with the least, were the ones who shared the most. They fed each other. They took each other in. They were all poor, together, helping each other stay alive — right up until the casinos came and created better opportunities. And what a change. I have watched, with real joy, a rebirth of Native America that I never expected to see in my years — nations rising out of poverty, building schools and clinics and futures. The abuse and poverty of the past is still a wound that may never completely close. A history that should never let anyone change as Native America continues to grow in stature. Money was the old wound. For some Nations, gaming began to close it — not for everyone, and not all the way, but enough to change what was possible. And for the Nations that got ahead, the challenge now is not making money. It is protecting sovereignty, and keeping our histories whole for our children. Here is the good news I most want you to hear: the old law — sharing as a way of life — didn’t vanish when the money arrived. It came roaring back, at a scale the old chiefs could never have imagined.

Look. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community of Minnesota, one of the wealthiest tribes per capita in America, guides its giving by a Dakota tradition of generosity and helping one another. By its own account it has given hundreds of millions of dollars to other tribes and Native causes, and made roughly half a billion more in low-interest, tribe-to-tribe loans — so poorer nations can build their own schools, water systems, and hospitals without kneeling to a predatory bank. The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation (formerly the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians), in California, reports more than $450 million in giving since 2003 — to Native nations and to the communities around them. The Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations turn vast business portfolios toward lifting the smaller nations around them. And in California, tribal-state gaming compacts feed the Revenue Sharing Trust Fund — gaming tribes pay in, and tribes with little or no gaming of their own draw a steady share. Do you see it? The Haudenosaunee chief who owned the least because he gave the most — and, three hundred years later and a thousand miles west, a Dakota community that shares half a billion because generosity is still how a people measures itself. Two different nations. Two different words for it. The same instinct, still running. It is one of the oldest things in Indian Country, wearing a modern success.

And you do not have to invent the way to do it, because the longhouse — that old idea of many nations under one roof — is still standing. The National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944, does something the old Grand Council would recognize — hundreds of nations finding one voice. The Inter-Tribal Councils of Michigan, California, and beyond pool health, legal, and economic strength the way the confederacy once pooled the harvest. The InterTribal Buffalo Council is bringing the herds home. The Native American Rights Fund defends the land and the water. The First Nations Development Institute moves grants and training out to the communities that need them. That is the gift economy, alive, organized, and wearing a 501(c)(3). So the invitation of this whole piece is simple, and it is old: the nation that got ahead opens a seat behind it. Not charity tourism. Not a week watching from the corner. A real desk, a real mentor, in a nation that already has courts and clinics and IT and finance — for a young person from a small Native Community that has none of those rooms yet. Because what we share is bigger than money. We share knowledge. Opportunity. Self-respect. And most of all, we share the character and the disciplines of the ones whose footsteps we follow — so the next generation carries the strength, not just the check. I watched it happen — and the record is Oklahoma’s own. When the door to self-government finally swung open in the 1980s, it was often the tribe’s own U.S. military veterans, returning home, who walked their nations through it — men and women who had worn this country’s uniform, learned how its systems worked, and came home to serve their own people. Leaford Bearskin, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, came home and led the little Wyandotte Nation for nearly thirty years — growing it from five employees to more than five hundred, standing up elder care, health services, housing, a library: a small Nation learning again how to take care of its own. John Hair, thirteen years in the U.S. Army, led the United Keetoowah Band into self-governance from almost nothing; his people later named their museum for him. And Wilma Mankiller — no soldier, but every inch a chief — poured the Cherokee Nation’s strength back into its own people before there was a dollar of casino money. Different nations, one instinct: take care of your own people first. And in doing it, each proved its own ancestors right — that the old wisdom was never a relic; it still builds. That is the record of the last thirty years, and it is a model this whole country needs. Our sovereignty is not best protected only by guarding what we already have. It is protected by producing America’s future leaders. Future mayors. Future governors. Future senators. Future Supreme Court Justices. Future presidents. And the desk is where that climb begins. The young person a Nation seats beside its own leaders today — in the courtroom, the clinic, the finance office — is the mayor, the judge, the senator it is quietly raising for tomorrow. Here is the part that matters most — and the part that is only just beginning.

Native Americans are roughly three in every hundred people in this country. For most of America’s history, the number of Native faces in its highest offices wasn’t three in a hundred — it was closer to none in a thousand. That gap is not an accident, and it is not a verdict. It is a canyon that a whole people is now, at last, crossing.

And look who has already reached the far rim.

Charles Curtis — Kaw Nation, raised partly on the reservation, speaking Kansa and French before he spoke English — rose to become Vice President of the United States, 1929 to 1933. To this day no Native person has held a higher federal office. His record is not one to romanticize — he backed the assimilation policies of his era, which many Nations still count as loss — but the door he opened was real. It happened once. It can happen again — and next time, it does not have to be the ceiling. Then, for a long stretch, the door stuck. It took until 2018 for the first two Native women — Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland — to win seats in Congress at all. But watch how fast the rim filled in once they crossed it. Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, became the first Native American ever to lead a Cabinet department — Secretary of the Interior, the very agency that once governed Native people from the outside, now run by one of their own. Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba, Chief of the Mohegan Tribe, became the first Native American Treasurer of the United States — and the currency printed during her term still carries her name, a Native woman’s signature on American money. Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, serves as Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota — among the highest-ranking Native women ever to hold state executive office.

Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, was confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security in March 2026 — the second Native American ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency. Proof that Haaland was not a single lightning strike, but the start of weather. Tom Cole, Chickasaw, has served in the U.S. House since 2003 — the longest-serving Native American in the history of the U.S. House — and now chairs the House Appropriations Committee, the panel that holds the federal government’s purse. Beloved at home and returned to office term after term, he stands at the very center of how America decides where its money goes. And this is not new, either — it is a return. Robert Owen, Cherokee, was one of Oklahoma’s first United States Senators, and he helped write the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 — the law that built the modern American economy. A Native man helped design the country’s money more than a century ago.

Here is the deepest truth beneath all of it: when a Native leader walks into the United States Capitol, they are not a newcomer to democracy. They are coming home to it. The Haudenosaunee — the Six Nations whose Great Law of Peace helped inspire the U.S. Constitution itself — built a working, representative confederacy on this soil centuries before that founding document was drafted. In 1988, Congress itself formally acknowledged that the Iroquois Confederacy helped shape the very government of the United States. The ideas America calls its own were, in part, learned here first.

So the climb is not Native people asking to be let into someone else’s house. It is Native people returning to a house their ancestors helped build.

That is why the goal cannot stop at one senator, or one Cabinet chair, or one name on a dollar bill. The goal is the whole climb — future mayors, future governors, future senators, future Supreme Court justices, and yes, one day, a President. Not as a favor. As a homecoming.

The new tools of this age belong in that story too — and only in one paragraph, because they are only a tool. The young leaders we raise will command artificial intelligence the way their ancestors commanded the newest technology of every era before them: as the boss, never the servant, carrying the same hard questions with them — whose information is this, who holds the key, what stays human. The tool is new. The discipline is ancient.

It’s important that you know where I’m coming from.

I was born in America, and I was taught, as every child here is taught, that this is my country. But I was also raised with my eyes open, and I learned young that this is not my ancestors’ country. It is yours. It always has been. And still — to this day — I have heard Native Americans say, plainly, that they are not treated as full American citizens in America. Made to feel like guests. Second-class, on their own land.

I share with you what the record says. The people treated as though they don’t belong here have defended this country at the highest rate, per person, of any group in it. And they did it before this country’s government would even claim them as citizens. Native men fought in the First World War while the law still did not count them; the Indian Citizenship Act did not come until 1924. Think on that. They bled for a nation that had not yet given them a ballot. There is no stronger word for belonging than that.

It’s important that you know, that I was not born or raised as Native of North America, however my mother is a Native of Central America and she married a white man who grew up poor among the Seminole people and he loved and respected them until the day he died.

So if I have one hope, it is this: that the smallest child, from the day she is born, is taught what her ancestors already earned for her — a truth no one should ever have made her doubt:

“This is my country.”

The record is already hers. The road is already open — and it is hers to walk, with all of our support, hopes, and blessings.