Indigenous Leadership - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Indigenous Leadership

Gary Sandefur & Philip J. Deloria

Abstrait: A short contextual overview of the past and present opens up a discussion of the challenges sur-
rounding American Indian leadership in the contemporary world and into the future. We survey some of
the literature on Native American leadership and consider leadership issues in institutional settings such
as academia, tribal governments, pan/inter-Indian organizations, public interest and NGO groups, et
global Indigenous structures, suggesting ways in which non-Native organizations can better recognize, concernant-
spect, and partner with American Indian leaders.

Dans 1993, leadership consultant Emmett Murphy sug-

gested that American businesses could learn valuable
lessons by studying American Indian leaders. He dis-
sected the Battle of the Little Big Horn, comparing
the leadership style of George Armstrong Custer–
self-centered, top-down, predatory, one-dimensional
–with that of Sitting Bull, whom he framed as “he-
roic.” Murphy’s Sitting Bull offered a role model for
leadership that was powerfully confident, mais aussi
collectivist, organic, strategic, and smart. Two de-
cades later, football coach Mike Leach saw a biogra-
phy of Geronimo as the most effective way to con-
vey his own set of leadership lessons. Sans surprise,
these focused on preparation, leverage, nimbleness,
toughness, indefatigability, and other tropes drawn
from the sport.1 Indian leadership–at least as it was
viewed from the outside–was a bit about what you
wanted it to be.

Over the last several decades, the idea of leader-
ship has become something of an American obses-
sion. The Murphy and Leach books were part of a
long wave of prescriptive writing on the subject, de-
ten focused on business and government. That writ-
ing has been supported by a consulting, coaching,
and leadership training industry, itself backed by
a range of academic studies, and given additional

gary sandefur is Provost and
Senior Vice President of Academ-
ic Affairs and Professor of Sociol-
ogy at Oklahoma State University.
He is the author of Growing Up with a
Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps
(with Sara McLanahan, 1994) et
has published essays in such collec-
tions as Quality and Inequality in Ed-
ucation (éd. Japp Dronkers, 2010)
and Key Indicators of Child and Youth
Well-Being (éd. Brett Brown, 2008).

philip j. deloria, a Fellow of
the American Academy since 2015,
is Professor of History at Harvard
University. He is the author of
American Studies: A User’s Guide (avec
Alexander Olson, 2017), Indians in
Unexpected Places (2004), and Playing
Indian (1998) and editor of Blackwell
Companion to Native American History
(with Neal Salisbury, 2002).

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heft through an ill-defined but well-sub-
scribed set of leadership classes and ex-
periences for high school and college stu-
bosses. Though we struggle to define it and
to teach it, most of us think we know lead-
ership when we see it, and we understand
que, d'une manière ou d'une autre, it matters.

Leadership matters to American Indian
people as well, not only in relation to deep
historical traditions of strong leadership,
but also to contemporary challenges and
opportunities. Modern leadership chal-
lenges emerge from tribal obligations to
both maintain and transform Indigenous
social and cultural practice, intertribal or-
ganizing across Indian Country around a
host of issues, and the constant imperative
to develop and assert a sovereign futuri-
ty in a national and global world of prolif-
erating institutional obligations, relation-
ships, and responsibilities. Native Amer-
ican leadership carries its own particular
sets of dangers, and these play out across
a full range from the intimate, locale, et
tribal to the international and Indigenous.
The tasks are many and they are hard.

Murphy and Leach situated American
Indian leadership in terms of military con-
flict, a set of historical contexts that can
make leadership seem obvious after the
fact. Step outside those contexts, into the
everyday nuts and bolts of contemporary
leadership, and one may well find (partic-
ularly from non-Native observers) a dif-
ferent reading: a set of critiques. These
often frame Indian leadership as being
full of culture-bound deficiencies–nep-
otism, factionalism, corruption, and gen-
eral ineffectiveness–that limit Indigenous
potential in today’s world. Consider, pour
example, the discourse surrounding the
2016 protests against the Dakota Access
Pipeline, which took place on the Stand-
ing Rock reservation in North and South
Dakota. Pipeline advocates accused Indian
people of what were essentially failures of
tribal leadership: they had not been proac-

tive on administrative issues and had mo-
bilized too late to be truly effective. Le
implication was that better leaders would
have anticipated problems before they be-
came crises and, once in crisis, would have
managed affairs more forcefully.

En même temps, the Dakota Access
Pipeline protest camps–with large num-
bers of shifting participants over a period
of several months–self-consciously re-
fused to churn out visible media-friendly
leaders, as the American Indian Move-
ment had done in the early 1970s during
its takeover of the village of Wounded
Knee, South Dakota. If one familiar as-
pect of leadership seems to be the gen-
eration of charismatic figures able to or-
ganize and speak for others, those people
were not readily apparent–at least to the
outside world. Where were the leaders? Il
was not until relatively late in the occupa-
tion that mainstream media actually be-
gan to identify the movement and its trib-
al leaders. The New York Times, for exam-
ple, published its profile on Joseph White
Eyes, Jasilyn Charger, Bobbi Jean Three
Legs, and other youth leaders in January
2017, as the occupation was already wind-
ing down. And it framed tribal council and
traditional leaders as being as late to the
game as the Times itself.2

Other observers looked at Standing Rock
and saw something different. To them,
leadership was everywhere, active in alter-
native–and often highly laudable–forms.
Leaders combined localism and Indigenous
practice with global social media network-
ing and developed a complex web of part-
nerships with environmental and anticap-
italist organizers. Standing Rock suggest-
ed a more human set of leadership values:
decentralization, spirituality, self-deflect-
ing humility, collectivism, the navigation
of subgroup interests, and a sometimes
contentious but epistemologically distinct
diffusion of authority. In this sense, Indi-
an leadership was not so much an object of

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147 (2) Spring 2018Gary Sandefur & Philip J. Deloria

critique, or a set of lessons drawn from the
past, but a model for thinking about “new
ways” of organizing and leading people that
pointed to the future.

How might we make sense of this land-
scape? D'abord, we should admit that our
thinking is likely to be colored by a long tra-
dition in which (mostly) White Americans
offer stereotypical visions of Indian leader-
ship, usually cast in terms of conflict. Em-
mett Murphy and Mike Leach echoed fa-
miliar (if often grudging) American appre-
ciation for figures such as Powhatan, King
Philip, Osceola, Black Hawk, Red Cloud,
Chief Joseph, Quanah Parker, et d'autres.
These men knew how to unify, organize,
strategize, and lead people. The evidence
for their leadership was clear: it lay in
their resistance to American colonial in-
cursions. Their eventual defeat made them
safe to celebrate. To tell their story was to
receive Indian leadership lessons while
confirming the supposed essential supe-
riority of American society. It was, as in the
cases of Murphy and Leach, yet another
form of appropriation.

Deuxième, when considering Indian leaders
outside the military–or the militant, dans le
case of the American Indian Movement–
Americans have been slow to recognize
three essential aspects: a much wider range
of individual leaders (where are the busi-
ness books on Zitkála-Šá, Arthur C. Parker,
or Wilma Mankiller?), intertribal organi-
zations (such as the Society of American
Indians, the National Congress of Ameri-
can Indians, or the Council of Energy Re-
source Tribes), or the existence of tribal
governments themselves. Despite the ex-
istence of a deep roster of Indian political
leaders, Americans fail to recognize Indi-
an equivalents of Martin Luther King, Mal-
colm X, John Lewis, or Jesse Jackson. De-
spite a proliferation of American Indian in-
stitutional leadership structures, for most
non-Native observers, there is no visible an-
alogue to the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (naacp),
the Urban League, or the Southern Chris-
tian Leadership Council. The intricacies of
tribal leadership remain a mystery. The cu-
mulative weight of often-negative report-
ing on tribal activities has created, if any-
chose, a shallow stereotype about deficien-
cies in Indian vision and management in the
contemporary world. And it remains only
barely possible to imagine Indian leader-
ship in non-Indian institutional or political
contexts. American Indian senators, busi-
ness leaders, or university administrators
are marked as exceptions that prove a rule
of absence.

In short, general views of Indian lead-
ership are often marked by positive mis-
understandings, negative misunderstand-
ings, and general ignorance. These views
sit in tension with Indigenous understand-
ings of American Indian leadership, et
they do so whether the focus is on his-
torical leaders like Sitting Bull or Geron-
imo, on tribal officials and intertribal or-
ganizers, or on the work of emergent lead-
ers like the activists at Standing Rock. Dans
these gaps lie a series of questions about
leadership in general, and more particu-
larly about past, présent, and future lead-
ership in Indian Country. How do contem-
porary Indian leaders function in relation
to historical legacies and new institution-
al structures? What are the achievements,
needs, and opportunities for leadership in
Indian Country in the future? Are there
commonalities among different tribal
leadership experiences? Can one usefully
identify specifically “Indian” styles of
leadership in the historical and sociologi-
cal record? If so, how have their elements
changed in relation to conquest and col-
onization? How might Indian leadership
practices transform the wider world of
leadership? What is leadership, anyway?

To be human is to be part of many differ-

ent kinds of social groupings, and to or-

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesIndigenous Leadership

der and organize those groups around such
concepts as responsibility, kinship, droits,
reciprocity, hierarchy, delegation, repre-
phrase, opportunité, initiative, freedom,
restraint, and decision-making. As part of
such social organization, individuals find,
prendre, and are assigned roles as leaders: peo-
ple able to mobilize “social influence” in
order to “enlist the support of others in
the accomplishment of a common task.”3
Leadership can range from flexible and
situational (“You lead the discussion this
time”) to absolute and dictatorial (“I am
in charge until I die and will kill you if you
disagree”). It can be structured in terms
of representational politics, institution-
al roles, personal achievement, social role
modeling, and interpersonal charisma,
entre autres. Over both historical time
and geographic and social space, Ameri-
can Indian people, not surprisingly, have
built a wide range of leadership practices.
How are those practices to be known?
Scholarship on American Indian leadership
has tended to fall into three broad catego-
ries. Many writers take a historical and bi-
ographical approach, tracing the rise of in-
dividual tribal leaders and their responses
to situations–specific crises and structur-
al changes–that demanded leadership.
Others work with what are essentially eth-
nographic models, developing theories of
leadership out of social and cultural under-
standings of Indian lives and worldviews.
Still others make comparisons, often delin-
eating Western leadership styles, and then
outlining differences with a generalized
picture of Indian leadership style. Consid-
erations of contemporary leadership have
often used all three approaches, applying
them to various institutional frames, dans-
cluding tribal governance, education ad-
ministration, law, politique, and lobbying.

Biography is usefully considered one of
the earliest and most productive pathways
into the question of Indigenous leadership,
and perhaps no scholar has done as much

to consolidate the questions as historian R.
David Edmunds, who edited Native Amer-
ican Leaders: Studies in Diversity (1980) et
The New Warriors: Native American Leaders
Since 1900 (2001), while authoring books on
the Shawnee Prophet and Tecumseh that
explicitly considered the question of lead-
ership. Edmunds has been committed to
complicating the kinds of shallow under-
standings that underpinned writers like
Murphy and Leach, who saw leadership
in terms of the mobilization of followers
around crisis events rather than everyday
social life, and framed leadership actions
in terms of strategy and tactics. Many of
the contributors to the Edmunds volumes
(and those edited by L. G. Moses and Ray-
mond Wilson, Margot Liberty, and Freder-
ick Hoxie, entre autres) are themselves bi-
ographers. Along with substantial numbers
of “as told to” narratives and memoirs, ils
help make visible an enormous world of In-
dian leadership–if we are willing to see it–
diverse across time, espace, tribe, social iden-
tity, and function. Not all Indian leaders are
war leaders; not all leaders are chiefs; pas
all leaders live in the past.4

Biography helps us understand these dif-
ferent kinds of leadership, carried through
past to present and future. Tribal nations
have had visionary leaders, able to see big
pictures and chart courses through the chal-
lenges of military conquest and colonial
domination. Edmunds’s work on Tecum-
seh, Par exemple, details his concept of a
massive pantribal military alliance and the
traveling diplomacy he undertook to bring
it to life. Tribes have had intellectual and
ideational leaders, generating new ideas and
figuring out strategies for working within
the structures of the United States. Histo-
rian Frederick Hoxie’s treatments of Paiute
author and activist Sarah Winnemucca,
Omaha lawyer Thomas Sloan, Crow law-
yer and administrator Robert Yellowtail,
and Seneca journalist and lobbyist Alice
Jemison, entre autres, offer excellent ex-

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147 (2) Spring 2018Gary Sandefur & Philip J. Deloria

amples. Tribes have had underappreciat-
ed managerial and administrative leaders,
skilled at maintaining the everyday func-
tioning of their people. During the Dako-
ta Access Pipeline struggle, for example,
Standing Rock Tribal Chair David Archam-
bault II–a pragmatic and capable leader–
emerged as an important public voice ar-
ticulating arguments for tribal sovereign-
ty, due process, and respectful consultation
(and consent) between tribes and the fed-
eral government.

Despite the ways that biographers have
given us a broad range of leaders, the form
does not always lend itself to clear under-
standings of tribal leadership writ large.
The questions surrounding leadership get
caught up in tracing the life course of the in-
dividual and are too easily framed around
the central problems–or even crises–that
they engaged in during their lives. For all its
virtues, the form tends to assume that lead-
ers are made by the contexts in which they
operate, or by the upbringings that shaped
their characters, or both. Biography moves
more readily toward specifics and thus away
from generalizable concepts that might be
transferred or compared in a larger study of
leadership itself.

Another way to think about tribal lead-
ership springs from the broader–but still
contained–context of particular Indige-
nous cultures or, in many cases, of inter-
tribal organizing. Anthropologist Ruth
Benedict’s 1934 study Patterns of Culture, pour
example, used three Indigenous case stud-
ies in which leadership was framed not in
the Western terms of individual exception-
alism, but through culturally shared social
roles: sacred priesthoods and medicine so-
cieties, lineage nobility titles, clan obliga-
tion, and shamanism. These forms did
not require crisis-centered leadership; dans-
stead, good leaders concerned themselves
with the daily maintenance of social struc-
photos, which encouraged a proliferation of
leadership roles centered on “being a good

relative,” “doing things with care,” “acting
like a human being,” or similar ideas that
framed leadership largely as a shared en-
terprise. These are valuable lessons. But it
is also the case that Benedict was writing
out of an ahistorical ethnographic present,
focused on exhibiting culture as much as
histoire. The static nature of her interpreta-
tion failed to account for changes in lead-
ership practice in relation to the challeng-
es of colonial domination and conquest.5
Hoxie’s detailed history of Crow politics
at the turn of the twentieth century, by con-
trast, reveals exactly how these culturally
centered everyday leadership styles and in-
terests might proliferate in a colonial con-
text, often functioning within and in rela-
tion to new institutional structures–tribal
councils, church organizations, the Office of
Indian Affairs–each of which encouraged
new kinds of governance. The transition be-
tween earlier structures–charismatic lead-
ership, collective governance, and the im-
portance of social role and behavior–to hy-
brid political models that included forms of
electoral representation marked a series of
reorganizations in the very nature of tribal
leadership. What did it mean to map voting,
districting, and elections onto existing polit-
ical structures? Inévitablement, these things cre-
ated dissention about the very idea of shift-
ing structures and about the leaders who
would navigate them. And yet, at the same
temps, everyday Crow cultural values cush-
ioned and mediated those changes, creat-
ing new possibilities. Across North Amer-
ica, tribes working to maintain and create
social and political structures in relation
to ongoing colonial domination have also
generated new leaders and new forms of
leadership. Anthropologist Loretta Fowler
has revealed the importance of long-stand-
ing Arapahoe age-graded leadership struc-
photos, which knit Arapahoe society together
across both generations and kin groups and
underpinned a symbolic politics centered
on ideas of progress (rather than tradition)

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesIndigenous Leadership

that proved effective as they developed new
forms of political leadership.

In the early twentieth century, Indian
people developed a wide range of business
councils, church-based groups, issue-cen-
tered lobbying organizations, and cultural
réseaux, each of which created significant
Indian leadership opportunities, often for
femmes. These new-old social forms arose
in relation to colonialism, bien sûr, mais
also through increased mobility, Western
éducation, and new forms of political en-
gagement. The Society of American Indians
(sai), Par exemple, offers a powerful exam-
ple of new intertribal leadership structures.
Modeled after the naacp, engaged with ac-
ademic sociology, and focused on a wide
range of issues, the sai allowed a diverse
group of leaders to build what was essen-
tially the first Indian think tank. It was nota-
ble, among other things, for the leadership
of activists Zitkála-Šá (Gertrude Bonnin),
Marie Baldwin, and Laura Cornelius Kel-
logg, who took on critical roles in organiz-
ing and articulating an intellectual agenda
for the group. En effet, reviewing the first or-
ganizing meeting, one finds that Kellogg’s
energy and boldness stands out among her
colleagues, Zitkála-Šá proved an intellectu-
al and organizational force of nature, et
Baldwin’s expertise in both law and the cul-
ture of the Office of Indian Affairs modeled
new kinds of institutional political and pol-
icy leadership. The sai and other intertrib-
al organizations, in tandem with the rep-
resentation-based tribal councils created
following the 1934 Indian Reorganization
Acte, laid a template for groups such as the
National Congress of American Indians,
the National Indian Youth Council, le
American Indian Movement, the Native
American Rights Fund, the American In-
dian Science and Engineering Society, et
a range of other organizations that sought
to exert national and international lead-
ership in both tribal and intertribal con-
texts in the years following World War II.

These groups helped nurture and push to
prominence a diverse collection of Indi-
an leaders and strategists: Lucy Coving-
ton, Helen Peterson, Robert Bennett, Tillie
Walker, Vine Deloria Jr., Ada Deer, Louis
Bruce, Clyde Warrior, Hank Adams, Mel
Thom, Helen Maynor Schierbeck, Russell
Means, Dennis Banks, John Echo Hawk,
Norbert Hill, Janine Pease, Elouise Cobell,
and many others. They helped create a new
world of Indian leadership that functioned
in relation to American political and eco-
nomic institutions, enabling the host of
contemporary organizations and leaders
that characterize Indian Country today and
that are planning for its future.

The question of tribal leadership raises

the question of cultural influence: is there,
Par exemple, an identifiably Iroquois (ou
Sioux or Seminole or x, oui, or z) style of lead-
ership that is the product of particular sets
of values and particular histories? Trib-
al leadership does, in fact, rest upon both
Indigenous historical memory and prac-
tice and the adjustments and necessities
of navigating American politics and law.
Historical contexts–long-standing fami-
ly, clan, and kin alignments, Par exemple,
or embedded cultural logics–help explain
some of the challenges of tribal leadership
such as factionalism or deeply deliberative
decision-making. In a similar manner, dans-
tertribal leadership raises the possibility
of commonality across tribal lines, et
thus something like a generalizable Amer-
ican Indian style of leadership. Intertrib-
al leadership also rests upon the contexts
of American colonialism, which seeks to
présent (at least in theory) unified poli-
cies to diverse Indian peoples, requiring
Indigenous leadership and organization
at a national scale. It is in this juxtaposi-
tion–American (or Western) and pan-In-
dian (or Indigenous)–that one finds ana-
lytical efforts to make sense of American
Indian leadership by isolating character-

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147 (2) Spring 2018Gary Sandefur & Philip J. Deloria

istic pantribal elements, an interpretive
move that is enabled by comparison.

The danger in such an analysis is readily
visible in the efforts of a writer like Emmett
Murphy, who frames Custer’s leadership in
crude terms, and thus finds himself essen-
tializing Sitting Bull as well, creating time-
less Indian characteristics and styles. Since
almost all of these characteristics carry pos-
itive (usually antimodernist) valeurs, ils
are appealing as objects of desire not simply
to non-Indian readers, but to Indigenous
ones as well. Amidst the messy complexi-
ty of actual leadership practice, though, le
effort to consolidate cautiously a few cate-
gories of Indigenous practice remains valu-
able–not in terms of fixing essential and
generalized ideals, but as heuristic devices
used to think more deeply about Indigenous
worlds past, présent, and future.

Education researcher Miles Bryant has
made a useful effort to identify such gen-
eral categories, arguing that American In-
dian views of leadership might be seen in
terms of six characteristics.6 Many of these
remain useful descriptors and will, in fact,
be familiar to Native leaders and to schol-
ars of Indigenous leadership. Bryant em-
phasized the decentralized nature of Indi-
an leadership. Across a range of social roles
and needs, different people move through
different positions as leaders in, for exam-
ple, ceremony, war, gouvernance, teaching,
or subsistence. They might, in other con-
texts, be followers, according to their ex-
pertise and the circumstance. Few individ-
uals are leaders in every context. This dif-
fusion requires a more flexible posture on
authority, which shifts situationally across
a range of individuals. Such decentralized
structures produce leadership that is less
directive and even noninterventionist. Is
the role of a leader to diagnose individual
and collective problems and then organize
others to fix them? Doing so may imply a
lack of trust, a sense that one person–the
leader–somehow knows better than oth-

ers. Indigenous leaders are often content
to wait to be asked for help, and to place
value on both leader-like patience and the
social meaning of an eventual request to
take the lead.

Is Western leadership instrumental in

terms of decision-making? Bryant has
suggested that such is indeed the case: it
seeks to identify a future state, set a clear
direction, break apart goals, delegate tasks,
minimize resource investment, rationalize
structures, and emphasize speed and effi-
ciency. These elements may also be present
in Indigenous decision-making, but Native
American leaders tend to utilize processes
that emphasize the nurturance of the col-
lective. Questions are more readily talked
to consensus (or exhaustion) plutôt que
enunciated as a winning argument aimed
at establishing the dominance of one po-
sition over another. It is less a question of
convincing a powerful leader to take a par-
ticular action than convincing everyone of
the rightness of a certain course. En effet, it
is in that process of persuasion that Indig-
enous leaders demonstrate confidence and
project power. Charisma, personal magne-
tism, social-cultural status, spiritual favor,
intelligence, and articulateness all help in-
dividuals rise in the eyes of the collective.
This kind of process requires a leadership
willing to think differently about time, dans
which efficiency is not inevitably the high-
est value. The path to action, in Indigenous
leadership, lies not strictly through a pro-
jection of a future outcome or completed
task, but through the maintenance of the
social and spiritual condition of the pres-
ent. From that beginning, Indigenous lead-
ers have been challenged to fuse past his-
tories, pratiques, and values together with
a future that engages the possibilities of
changement. That condition is characterized by
a broader view of the world in which all
things have immanent value: c'est, an un-
derstanding of not simply obvious human

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relationships, but also less obvious ones,
and with relationships characteristic of a
complex nonhuman spiritual world that
is itself part of the everyday.

All of these factors bear on the ways that
leaders, ideally, present themselves. If Ma-
chiavelli gave us the Prince as a Western
model of visibility, pragmatism, and indi-
viduality, many tribal leaders take pains
to project a very different public image.
While there are plenty of instances of per-
formative boasting, Indigenous leadership
often has a strong current of humility,
self-deprecation, deflection of praise, et
the absence of self-promotion, or has in-
cluded the deliberate redistribution of ac-
cumulated property such as in the potlatch
and gift-giving leadership structures of the
Northwest Coast. Leaders may accumulate
substantial material possessions, mais ils
often do so in order to funnel resources to
others, and thus either look poor or move
through cycles of wealth and redistribu-
tion. The historical record is replete with
examples in which Europeans in diplomat-
ic negotiations mistook orators for lead-
ers or sought to appoint leaders when they
could not readily identify them.

Bryant’s categories offer ideal-type char-
acteristics. Clairement, they do not apply to all
tribes, past or present; nor is it likely that
any single leader would exemplify all these
traits at all times. As descriptive categories,
they tend to float above historical change.
And they speak more easily to small social
groups than they do to the abstractions of
an imagined national Indigenous commu-
nity, Par exemple, or perhaps to intertrib-
al organizations with diverse constituents
and interests. En effet, reading Bryant’s de-
scription, one is struck by a twinned kind
of affect. D'une part, these factors
seem to be present, in one form or anoth-
er, among many contemporary American
Indian leaders; on the other hand, the feel
and tone of the categories–and their or-
igins as the opposites of Western traits–

suggest something like a precontact so-
cial organization. In that sense, ils sont
in danger of producing a picture of leader-
ship located somewhere outside of new in-
stitutional structures such as tribal coun-
cils, tribal colleges, intertribal organiza-
tion, and tribal and intertribal businesses.
The characteristics referred to by Bryant
–humility, self-deprecation, deflection of
praise, and the absence of self-promotion–
continue to serve as guides for non-Native
leadership. They appear, for example, dans
one of the most read and praised books on
leadership in the past several years: Jim Col-
lins’s Good to Great.7 They are part of what
Collins refers to as Level Five leadership,
the most effective kind of leadership in
the companies that he studied. Level Five
leaders are both modest and strong-willed.
They are ambitious not for themselves but
for their company. They are self-effacing
and understated. They are determined to
do whatever it takes to help the company
be successful.

Néanmoins, the general nature of such
categories threatens to leave contempo-
rary American Indian leaders betwixt and
entre. There is every possibility that a
leader exemplifying Bryant’s value system
might be accused by outsiders of dysfunc-
tional leadership of tribal institutions that
have to function successfully in American
political and economic contexts. In those
contexts, speed often matters–but consen-
sus requires time. Shared decentralized au-
thority can look like collective weakness.
Too much humility seems like a lack of con-
fidence and power. By non-Native stan-
dards, the culturally successful Indian lead-
er can look like a failure. And the reverse
is also dangerously true. Leaders who may
be effective in broader American econom-
ic and political contexts may be accused of
having moved too far from their cultural
racines. The Indigenous complaint is easily
launched and is powerful: this is how we In-
dians lead; why are you not doing it?

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Outside critiques of Indian leadership
tend to emerge from the first position. Ber-
nard Bass, coauthor of a long-running and
comprehensive manual on leadership, sug-
gests that Indian people are “repressed and
apathetic,” with the heroic leadership of
past chiefs only a faded memory, while they
are subject to “tribal councils that discour-
age participatory democracy and collabo-
rate with state bureaucracies to maintain
the status quo.” As university administrator
Linda Warner and public leadership scholar
Keith Grint have suggested, Western lead-
ers are often defined by their position more
than their actual skills (though this reality
is usually denied). Indian people who lead
differently are read as ineffectual leaders, un
mapping that racializes difference as defi-
cit. Not only is Indian difference racialized,
but it is also rendered ahistorical, as the very
real deficits and impingements of colonial
history and cultural destruction are erased.
Changing leadership–and leadership de-
mands–as scholar Lawrence J. Wise-Erick-
son has suggested, should be traced histor-
ically through challenges of demographic
changement, forced assimilation, and imposed
institutional structures.8

All of these challenges confront Ameri-
can Indian leaders. And yet, leadership is
alive and well in Native communities across
the country. How do we know? A view that
accounts for a full range–biographical, cul-
tural, and comparative/cross-cultural–re-
veals both new and old institutions, move-
ments, and networks, each requiring and
generating Indigenous leaders. At Standing
Rock, Par exemple, young leaders emerged
out of grassroots youth care and environ-
mental and social justice moments. Ils
joined a range of spiritual and cultural lead-
ers, social media–savvy networkers, Native
logistics leaders, national intertribal orga-
nization leaders, et, bien sûr, local trib-
al council leaders, entre autres. Tribal
chair David Archambault was arrested at
a protest, wrote editorials for The New York

Times, spoke frequently to media, helped
manage logistics and strategy, testified at
the United Nations Human Rights Coun-
cil in Geneva, kept the discourse focused
on prayer and nonviolence, managed dis-
appointment following the closing of the
protest camps, and continued the effort
through legal and administrative chan-
nels. Heroic leader? Here’s how Archam-
bault described himself: “I earn my own liv-
ing and don’t seek glory, fame, or wealth.
. . . I live a simple, prayerful life and strive
to make our home, community, and nation
a better place.”9 Leadership such as this–
often explicitly framed in terms of Dakota
or other Indigenous cultural values–made
Standing Rock the most effective Indian po-
litical mobilization in decades.

Or consider a leader such as Governor
Bill Anoatubby of the Chickasaw Nation in
Oklahoma. Governor Anoatubby lost his
father when he was less than three years old.
His mother raised him and his siblings, et
all were surrounded by family, friends, et
community in Tishomingo, the old capitol
of the Chickasaw Nation. Governor Anoa-
tubby’s first experiences with leadership
came in high school, where he served as
president of his class and on the student
council. When asked if he sought out these
positions, he replied, “No, I didn’t ask for it.
I wasn’t quite that assertive, but when asked
to do something I did it.” When told that
others must have seen leadership poten-
tial in him, he said “I often wondered what
they saw . . . I was co-captain of the football
team. I was selected All-Around Boy by the
teachers. I was always surprised when these
things happened. I thought it was very cool,
but I guess I never realized any potential I
may have had and just stepped in when I
was needed or asked to.”10

Governor Anoatubby went to work for
the Chickasaw Nation in 1975 as its first
health director. He became accounting di-
rector in 1976, then special assistant to the
governor, and then ran for lieutenant gov-

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ernor in 1979. He became governor in 1987
and continues in this position today, hav-
ing served for thirty years. When Governor
Anoatubby began his first term, the Chicka-
saw Nation had approximately 250 employ-
ees. It now has fourteen thousand employ-
ees and operates more than one hundred
businesses. As author Millie Craddick has
noted, “While the quiet, humble, unassum-
ing Chickasaw works hard to deflect atten-
tion from his accomplishments, the impor-
tance of the Chickasaw Nation under Gov-
ernor Anoatubby to Oklahoma’s economy
cannot be downplayed.”11

And one might trace similar patterns of
leadership, fusing everyday culture with
new possibilities, in a number of spheres:
tribal and intertribal business, academia,
politique, energy, atterrir, and environmen-
tal management, entre autres. From the
most local social services effort to global In-
digenous organizing, Indian leadership–
often working hard to embody values of
reciprocity, respect, service, and futurity–
remains part of the legacy and the future of
Indian Country.

Comment, alors, should non-Native institu-

tions engage Indian Country through its
leaders? We conclude with a few possi-
bilities. D'abord, it is critical to understand
the ways that tribal leaders, specifically,
are representatives of sovereign nations.
Models for communication and engage-
ment with tribes might do well to draw
more from the sensibilities of diplomacy
and administration than from business;
from the model of the treaty as much as
from the contract. A university that wants
tribal representation at an event, for ex-
ample, might have done well to establish
permanent relations on an entity-to-entity
basis, and engage in periodic consultation
on issues of mutual interest, of which there
may be a surprising number.

Deuxième, in that context, it should be un-
derstood that Native leaders will likely try

to embody complicated–and sometimes
contradictory–social meanings in their
leadership practices. Respect for differenc-
es around time, authority, and decision-
making are exactly what is meant by the
word “diplomatic.” Patience and persis-
tence are respectful recognitions of the
structural challenges–not some racialized
dysfunction–that Indigenous leaders are
working hard to navigate.

Troisième, it is important to understand the
full range of temporality that Indian lead-
ers necessarily engage. The first context
for Indigenous leadership is the historical
past, which is always deeply alive and vis-
ibly present, rich with local interpersonal
histories that are inevitably weighed down
by the very real traumas of colonial domi-
nation. A second context is the contempo-
rary, which demands an engagement with
the past, even as it presents a series of pos-
sibilities, hybridities, contradictions, di-
lemmas, and imperatives that are difficult
to manage. But perhaps the most impor-
tant context is that of the future. We say
this only partly in the context of leader-
like planning for the future. That matters,
bien sûr. But because Indian people and In-
dian leaders have so often been relegated to
the past, it remains challenging for non-Na-
tive people to see them in the present and
avenir. And yet, for American Indian lead-
ers, futurity–not just survival but self-de-
termination, prosperity, and happiness–
is everything. When non-Native institutions
engage Indigenous leaders on the ground of
a productively shared future that recogniz-
es and takes responsibility for the past, good
things will follow in the present.

Fourth, non-Native leaders can support
Indigenous leadership in nurturing the
next generation of American Indian lead-
ers. For the last several centuries, many of
the best Indian leaders have figured out how
to move in both Native and non-Native
worlds. Aujourd'hui, despite the deeply lingering
hurts of history, the possibilities for young

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147 (2) Spring 2018Gary Sandefur & Philip J. Deloria

people to remain grounded in the everyday
of a cultural home–no matter its physical
location–while also mastering the world
have never been better. Why not look for
ways to support that cultural home, les deux
for those future leaders in the making and
for the leaders who hope to nurture them?
A contemporary example worth emulating
is the Ambassadors Program run by Amer-
icans for Indian Opportunity, which has
been assisting early-career Native Ameri-
can professionals to develop their leader-
ship capacities within Indigenous cultur-
al contexts since 1993.12

Enfin, it is worth following the im-
pulse–if not always the lessons–of Em-
mett Murphy and Mike Leach. Indigenous
leadership is not an instrumental resource

upon which to draw in search of success in
business or football coaching. Mais, as ob-
servers of the Standing Rock effort noted,
it may in fact be a resource for a powerful-
ly humanistic rethinking of what leader-
ship is, how it functions, and how it might
be adapted and improved to better serve
the interests and needs of communities in
the contemporary world. Sitting Bull and
Geronimo may well have something to say
about that future. But perhaps it is just as
likely that productive insights will come
not from reading a book, but from active
engagement with and support of American
Indian leaders, the institutional forms in
which they work, and the people who have
granted them authority.

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endnotes
1 Emmett C. Murphy and Michael Snell, The Genius of Sitting Bull: Thirteen Heroic Strategies for Today’s
Business Leaders (New York: Prentice Hall, 1995); and Mike Leach and Buddy Levy, Geronimo:
Leadership Strategies of an American Warrior (New York: Gallery Books, 2014).

2 Saul Elbein, “The Youth Group that Launched a Movement at Standing Rock,” The New York
Times Magazine, Janvier 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/magazine/the-youth
-group-that-launched-a-movement-at-standing-rock.html (accessed July 25, 2017).

3 Martin M. Chemers, An Integrative Theory of Leadership (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum As-
sociates, 1997). See also Bernard Bass, Bass and Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research
and Managerial Applications, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1990).

4 David R. Edmunds, American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Presse, 1980); David R. Edmunds, The New Warriors: Native American Leaders since 1900 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2001); David R. Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Lead-
ership (Boston: Little, Brun, 1984); David R. Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1985); Frederick E. Hoxie, “The History of American Indian Lead-
ership: An Introduction,” American Indian Quarterly 10 (1) (Hiver 1986): 1–3; Frederick E.
Hoxie, This Indian Country: American Indian Political Activists and the Place They Made (New York: Stylo-
guin Press, 2012); L. G. Moses and Raymond Wilson, éd., Indian Lives: Essays on Nineteenth- et
Twentieth-Century Native American Leaders (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985);
and Margot Liberty, American Indian Intellectuals (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1978).

5 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).
6 Miles Bryant, “Contrasting American and Native American Views of Leadership,” presenta-
tion at the Annual Meeting of the University Council for Educational Administration, Octo-
ber 25–27, 1996, http://www.academia.edu/26861740/Contrasting_American_and_Native_
American_Views_of_Leadership (accessed July 25, 2017).

7 Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (New York: Harper

Business, 2001).

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8 Bernard Bass, Bass and Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research and Managerial Applications,
3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1990), 755; Linda Warner and Keith Grint, “American Indian
Ways of Leading and Knowing,” Leadership 2 (2) (2006): 226; and Lawrence J. Wise-Erickson,
Community-Based Leadership: A Study of American Indian Leadership (Ph.D. diss., unpublished, Se-
attle University, 2003) quoted in Warner and Grint, “American Indian Ways of Leading and
Knowing,» 231.

9 “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Issues New Fact Sheet in Form of Q & A with Chairman Archam-
bault,” Indian Country Today, Mars 16, 2017, https://www.standingrock.org/content/standing
-rock-sioux-tribe-issues-new-fact-sheet-form-q-chairman-archambault (accessed July 25,
2017). For other treatments of Indian leadership, see Elgin Badwound and William G. Tier-
ney, “Leadership and American Indian Values: The Tribal College Dilemma,” Journal of Amer-
ican Indian Education 28 (1) (1988): 9–15; Patrick D. Lynch and Mike Charleston, “The Emer-
gence of American Indian Leadership in Education,” Journal of American Indian Education 29 (2)
(1990): 1-dix; and David A. Cowan, “Profound Simplicity of Leadership Wisdom: Exemplary
Insight from Miami Nation Chief Floyd Leonard,” International Journal of Leadership Studies
4 (1) (2008): 51–81.

10 John Erling, interview, Voices of Oklahoma: Gov. Bill Anoatubby, 2010, http://www.voicesofoklahoma

.com/interview/anoatubby-bill/.

11 Millie J. Craddick, “Hall of Fame Member Spotlight: Bill Anoatubby,” Oklahoma: Magazine of
the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, Décembre 2015, 26–30, https://issuu.com/okheritage/docs/okhof_
december_2015_spreads-med_res.

12 For an overview, see Americans for Indian Opportunity, http://aio.org/about-the-aio-ambassadors

-program/.

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