By ROBERT JUMPER
Tutiyi (Snowbird) and Clyde, N.C.
Transparency is a byword in our society. We all seem to understand its importance, but we don’t seem to know what it is. And that is surprising.
If you had transparent clothing, you would not have a problem understanding what that meant. Granted, many of the things acceptable to wear in modern society are at least partially transparent (or nonexistent).
But true transparency is not partial seeing. It is total exposure. In the example above, old folks would call it “being in your birthday suit”. For most of us, it is not an exciting prospect. Indeed, there are certain parts of everyone’s “birthday suit” that should not be transparent, and we would prefer to remain a mystery (aka nontransparent). The old saying goes, “Beauty may be skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.”
I hope that you have had an opportunity to read Brooklyn Brown’s article on the happenings in Dinilawigi (Tribal Council) concerning the Qualla Enterprises LLC Board of Directors. And I hope her article prompted you to see for yourself the recording of the session on the EBCI (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) Communications Facebook page. If there was ever a gleaming example of why the members of our tribe need to insist on transparency, it played out in that session.
A resolution was put forward to remove one of the organization’s board members from office for alleged violations of the organization’s bylaws. For approximately two hours, a battle at the podium ensued. Members of the LLC board leveled accusations of inappropriate behavior and haphazard handling of confidential information against the board member at the center of the resolution to remove.
Now, for the uninitiated, Dinilawigi seemed firm in its conviction that personal and personnel situations shouldn’t be a part of public access. Typically, they will go into closed sessions or use off-camera sessions to address things like the quasi-judicial handling of a board member’s removal. So, at least for some of the discussion, transparency seemed important to the government. At one point, during the public portion of the discussion, there was a call made for a motion to close the session.
Uncharacteristically of Dinilawigi, a request from the resolution submitter to go into closed session was met with silence. The Chair asked for a motion to go into closed, and no motion was offered. This session was apparently going to allow the community a next-level view of transparency.
The result? After those hours of public testimony, the Dinilawigi concluded that an Ethics Committee investigation was warranted, not only on the individual board member identified by the Qualla Enterprises LLC board, but the board in its entirety needed to be investigated and suspended until a recommendation from the Ethics Committee may be rendered to the Dinilawigi. And Dinilawigi also found that the chairperson of the Qualla Enterprises LLC board had provided a statement that warranted her removal. So, they did.
And while they did go into an off-camera discussion after lunch to allow time to draft the appropriate legislation to execute their decision, the meat of the discussion was held in the public eye so that the community was able to see the rhyme behind the reason. It was one of the most transparent discussions held in Dinilawigi in quite some time.
Why am I bringing this up? Again, because our tribe has a hard time with transparency. Yes, there are legitimate pieces of information that we must protect. But we cloak-and-dagger way too much of our information. We, the community, are not the “they” that so many of our government officials point to when they say that there are “adversarial entities” that we deal with that prevent the community from knowing what is going on with their information and finances.
The discussion about the Qualla Enterprises LLC board is a great example of how we can be more transparent in the future. Our Dinilawigi resisted the urge of the resolution submitter, and their own habit, to hold these discussions in closed session. Why? I can only guess that they felt that the people needed to hear the arguments and Dinilawigi’s reasoning for what they would decide.
We need to see more of this level of transparency. If it takes having the Attorney General comb through each piece of proposed legislation and determine if it will hurt specific areas of our business, and to weigh the effect of releasing data to our community members, then maybe it would be prudent for our government to consider doing it. Because saying everything must be hidden is not a believable or defensible position. I am not sure there is anyone who believes that a $500 gift amount or a thousand dollars’ worth of grant funding announcement will damage the tribe in the least. And yet an innocuous per-capita distribution of less than $200 per person was deemed necessary to be hidden from the public.
A little fear typically leads to a lot of fear. Check out this definition from the Better Health Channel: “Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD) is a mental health condition characterized by a pervasive, irrational, and long-standing distrust of others, featuring the belief that people are deliberately out to harm, deceive, or exploit you, even without evidence. It involves interpreting benign remarks as threats, holding grudges, and severe suspicion”.
And when a person or a government is not transparent, and they begin to withdraw, the behavior tends to look like PPD.
I was looking at our local funeral home’s website in search of an obituary of a friend. As I was browsing the site, I noticed a tab titled “General Price List”. It was odd to me that they would do that. I was expecting a list of “package prices” with aggregate information. When I clicked the tab, I was presented with five detailed pages of all goods and services, complete with detailed pricing. Their website is robust and transparent. I thought about those in need of their services and what a reassurance it would be to be able to review this type of information in detail. And I thought about the fact that it didn’t matter if I was in Birdtown or Australia, I could literally pull up this information anywhere in the world. Could competitors, or maybe adversarial entities, of the funeral home see it? You bet. Could bad actors use that information to undercut their prices or craft proposals for services to them based on the financial information provided? Sure, they could. But the leadership of that business weighed the value of that information for their client and community against the potential for adversarial entities using it, and this business decided it was more important for the community to know, and that the benefit to the business would be greater in sharing that information.
I know that the tribe is not a funeral home, but I hope you get the point. And no, I don’t want to see the tribe’s birthday suit. I just think our government can do a better job of balancing the things that need to be confidential and the things that should be transparent.
Just a side note. During the discussion and the voting process, Wayohi (Wolftown) Representative Bo Crowe didn’t participate in the discussion and abstained from voting on the three resulting resolutions from that discussion. He did so because a member of his family was part of the debate. What he did was the ethical and right thing to do. He could have fought it or argued it, which would be a normal response to having someone accuse your loved one. Instead, he chose to act with dignity and integrity. I appreciated that.
