by Fred Fisher
I would like to begin by thanking Patrice Kunesh for her article for the NNCTC last month. “What We Inherit & What We Send Forth: How Tribes Can Improve Community Well-Being Through Trauma-Informed and Asset-Based Care” summarizes the themes of our first webinar on trauma-informed community development and connects the principles and practices of trauma-informed care to community and economic development efforts on tribal lands and communities. Not long after we hosted the webinar with Patrice and featured her article on the NNCTC website, she was appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council on Community Development. Patrice’s appointment reflects what those of us who have worked with her already know: she is one of the country’s foremost experts in tribal community and economic development, and she brings a wealth of applied policy development experience to her new role. I am excited at the thought that Patrice’s commitment to the application of trauma-informed principles in the planning and development of essential tribal infrastructure and services will influence policy at the highest levels. We at the NNCTC are also excited about our ongoing work with Patrice. Watch this space for Patrice’s future blog articles and recorded interviews, made possible by a partnership with the Indian Child Welfare Programs of the Casey Family Programs (CFP).
The title of this blog post references housing because Patrice, more than anyone else I have worked with, encouraged me to understand the critical role that tribal housing and homeownership play in successful community-development strategies that incorporate health, well-being, and asset development. From 2016-2019, CFP placed me as an Executive Fellow under Patrice’s leadership at the Center for Indian Country Development (CICD) at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. The CICD’s major initiative during these years was housing and home ownership on tribal lands. In this role, I came to understand that housing security has an unparalleled power to mitigate and reduce the stressors that drive disproportionate numbers of American Indian and Alaska Natives into contact with the child welfare system. This foundational understanding led me to familiarize myself with all of the major USDA Rural Development funding resources and eligibility criteria, along with these programs’ connections to other tribal programs like the HUD 184 tribal housing and homeownership lending program. Despite the fact that Rural Development offers a diverse range of funding streams for which tribes are either eligible or for which there is a tribal set-aside, some tribal leaders, health, and human services directors and staff are unaware of the range of grants, loans, and technical assistance available to meet the housing needs of their clients—or how to advocate for the physical infrastructure needs of the people they serve.
Beyond my own professional development, our team at the CICD achieved a great deal. We organized a nationally representative and diverse group of experts on housing in Indian Country into the National Native Homeownership Coalition, and we developed and facilitated seven subgroups within the coalition that worked on issues ranging from homebuyer readiness, to tribal land leasing and titling, to down-payment assistance strategies. Patrice and her staff provided expert testimony to Congress regarding policy and practice solutions to the many barriers that American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and their people experience with lending on tribal lands. The CICD generated research on issues and policy solutions and best practices in Indian Country and organized national convenings on tribal home ownership, culminating in the 2018 publication of the Tribal Leaders Handbook on Homeownership.
At a recent NNCTC staff meeting, we spoke about the foundational need to assume, based on the prevalence of trauma in tribal communities, that the experience of trauma is in every room we enter, while at the same time promoting and moving towards resilience.[i] The same wisdom applies to the development of housing options and solutions for tribal families ranging from those who are unhoused to those who are looking to invest their own capital (including “sweat equity”) in the development of housing on tribal lands. The provision of housing options for families should embed cultural values along with trauma assumptions and principles into the physical design and development of housing for tribal members.
At the same time, these principles must be incorporated into the financial and lending system that is set up to support first-time borrowers or applicants for credit. For many American Indian and Alaska Native families with children, financial stressors are multiple and often overwhelming. These stressors may trigger multiple overlapping trauma responses in parents, and these responses may impact the entire family. With the understanding that “trauma is in the room” and with trauma-informed principles embedded at the organizational level, tribal housing and home ownership programs can be designed to provide access to resources, to help families repair their credit and develop financial and other skills, and to support them in ways that position them to apply those skills successfully.
It is this kind of understanding, bolstered by resources such as the Tribal Leaders Handbook on Homeownership, that I am working to promote through the new Tribal Community Development section of the NNCTC website. I invite you to explore the various subsections.
Please reach out to me at Fred.Fisher@mso.umt.edu if you have any questions about the resources or connections to other tribal contacts and project.
[i] For a great overview of how tribal leaders and governments have adapted to and become more resilient over time in the face of a federal Indian policy that has resulted in “the wholesale theft of Indian lands and dependency on federal funds and programs… (and created) generations of unemployment, poor health, and shattered families,” read Patrice Kunesh’s “Constant Governments: Tribal Resilience and Regeneration in Changing Times” from Kansas Journal of Law & Pubic Policy, Vol. XIX, No. 1, 2009