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NCAI Director Pushes Tribes to Reach Out, ‘Turn the Tide’

With the lessons of her clan’s late chief to guide her, Jacqueline Johnson is trying to change the way things get done in Indian Country.

Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, wants to “turn the tide” and help tribes become more effective at fighting for their rights from Congress to the courthouse. The key to that success, she said, can be found in the words of her Tlinglit mentor.

“We need everyone. We can’t always be our best advocates,” Johnson said, recounting her mentor’s words to a group of journalists Sunday in Washington, D.C. “We know that we have to reach out further.”

Johnson, who heads the nation’s oldest and largest American Indian organization, kicked off a weeklong journalism fellowship with a talk about her group’s priorities. The journalists are spending eight days studying how to cover Indian Country, with some intensive training first in Washington.

Johnson said tribes are getting better at working together to pursue more strategic court cases, as civil-rights groups did in the past, and are trying to be more productive at lobbying lawmakers. American Indians traditionally have done a good job of communicating among themselves about the important issues, she said, and now she hopes they are getting better at talking to others.

In doing so, Johnson hopes tribes can be successful at her organization’s three top priorities: preserving sovereignty, promoting economic development and pushing for a resolution to the drawn-out trust problems.

Posted on 03.07.05 at 3:23 AM by Michelle DeArmond, Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise