Sober Leadership for the New Millennium
Kevin Gover Opens the Conference on Thursday,
September 18, 2003

Kevin Gover addresses the Conference

Kevin Gover is a friend of the Wellbriety Movement who spoke for recovery during the Hoop Journey visit to Albuquerque in 2000. At that time, in his role as head of the BIA, he also hosted the Journey of the Sacred Hoop when it arrived in Washington DC in July of 2000. His topic for the kick-off talk at Circles of Recovery 2003 is Sober Leadership for the New Millennium. We are honored and pleased now to present an edited transcript of his talk in this issue of Wellbriety! Magazine.

Kevin Gover

Sober Leadership in the New Millennium
From a talk by Kevin Gover
Given at the fourth annual Circles of Recovery Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico
September 18, 2003

It is a privilege and an honor for me to be here. I'm always struck by all the good things that happen to me because I'm sober. I'm an alcoholic, a child of an alcoholic, and there is a great deal of sickness in myself and in my family. But because of people like you, ten years ago I was able to get sober and have been that way ever since.

When I became the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the Clinton Administration it was important for me to immediately reveal that I was a recovering alcoholic because I had learned from my sponsor and from my group that the only value of these terrible experiences that I had as an alcoholic were that if I shared them with others, and if I lived in a good way, people would realize that they could too. I knew that the primary value, and maybe even the reason I ended up being the Assistant Secretary, was to be able to talk about things like that. And talk about it I did at every opportunity. In fact, the very first major speech that I gave as the Assistant Secretary was at the NANACOA conference in Seattle in 1997. I was so pleased then, and I am so pleased tonight, that there are so many people talking about these things. There are so many people here who are committed to working to resolve these terrible plagues that are at work in our community. We all know, even if perhaps the politicians don't, that so many of our leaders both in the tribes, and certainly in the federal government are in denial about the gravity of this problem, the harm that is created in our communities, the devastation that's being wreaked in our communities by these problems of alcoholism, substance abuse, violence and the sexual exploitation of our young people.

Healing Our Soul Wound
It's particularly good to see so many young people in this group. I wish that there were more. I hope that we will continue to bring the young people into this movement early so that they can live a whole life this way. As for me, I only get to live half my life sober now. And that's only if I really work at it. I lost half of it and I can never get it back. There's no point in feeling bad about that, yet I can't help but wish sometimes. My wish for my children, and for all children, is that they get to live a whole life in that way. That is our objective as part of this recovery movement that Don has spoken about so well and been so effective at.

I'm now a law professor at Arizona State University. One of the reasons that I wanted to teach was instead of having the opportunity of practicing law and doing stuff that other people were paying me to do, and thinking about what they wanted me to speak about and work on, I wanted finally to have the opportunity to think about what I wanted to think about, and work and research and study the problems that concern me the most. Because in the end—even though I'm really good at casinos, and I'm really good at water rights and Indian sovereignty—in the end, those just don't matter as much as the work that you all are doing here. One of the reasons I chose to teach instead of to continue to practice law is so that I can use my time to think and work and research and read and write about this problem. I consider it the most important issue that Indian tribes face throughout the country.

As Assistant Secretary, one of the places I went to was Hollywood, California. We went there to see what we could do to help establish a program for the preservation of Native American languages. As you know, several languages and dialects have been lost already and many more are on the endangered list. We went to a place called the Survivors of the Showa Foundation. It is a project to capture on video the recollections of every living person who survived the holocaust in Europe during WWII. They have tens of thousands of interviews recorded of the Jewish people who survived the Holocaust. Many of them had been in concentration camps, others were lucky enough not to end up in a camp, but still had a terrible experience during the Holocaust. That's what Showa means. The Showa is the Holocaust.

I asked the director of the foundation what kind of work they had been doing on second generation survivors—children of the actual survivors of the Holocaust. She said that they had only begun, but they were seeing some things that concern us a great deal. We see very high rates of alcoholism and substance abuse in the second generation of Holocaust survivors she revealed. We see suicide at very high rates in the second generation. We see divorce, we see family violence, we see all these things happening in the second generation survivors. I started reading about all this because it was obvious to me that that same phenomenon is at work in our community. Now we are beginning to have our PhD's, our psychologists, and our therapists out there write about this. They write in a very compelling way about how, we, the current generation of Native Americans have inherited all of these diseases and that are very much the product of the historical trauma that was suffered in our communities. The most vivid term that we have seen to describe this is the "soul wound" of the Native American. I think that is a very graphic image and one that I find very compelling.

Healing Our Historical Trauma
I got to thinking about just how this works in my own family. Just a few weeks ago my grandmother died. She was 95 years old. She was one of the very last of the original allotees on the Comanche reservation and she had a very long and a very good life. Our whole family came together for the funeral and I had a chance to look at the various generations of the family. I saw her sons and daughters. One of her sons was my father. My father died when he was 47 years old in a car wreck because he had been out drinking with a bunch of other guys. Several Pawnee men died that night for no other reason than alcoholism.

I looked at that generation of the family and then I looked at my generation—me and my sisters and my cousins. I wondered how we are doing. And I wondered about our nieces and nephews—the young people in the family—and how are they are doing. You can see that even though we are inheriting and passing on these diseases to our children, nevertheless each generation of the family is getting a little better. I could see a number of us who are in recovery, a number of us who are in AA, a number of us who have been through different treatment programs in order to begin to live in a good way. It was heartening in that sense that things are getting better even in our family. But you could also clearly see the trauma that has been passed from generation to generation. We heard some of the family stories and realized that these things go so far back. That, too, is part of the inheritance that my kids and their cousins are receiving from us.

The whole idea of generational trauma or historical trauma is one that deserves a lot more of our attention and one that I want to write about. I think everybody here knows that it's true. We all sense it, we all see it at work in our lives and in our families. But unless some smart guy writes a paper about it, it's really not "proven." We've got our "smart guys" now. They are out there and they are beginning to write about this. I believe that is going to become a very compelling factor and a tool that we will be able to use to great advantage to address these problems of alcoholism and substance abuse in the future.

Young People Need to Know
Don asked me to talk about "Sober Leadership in the New Millennium." What does that mean? Does that mean that our tribal leaders, our elected officials, need to be sober? Well, yeah, it means that, or should mean that. But that doesn't seem quite enough. I've been going to NCAI meetings for 25 years. The difference is staggering if we think back to what it was like when the tribal leaders gathered in the 70's and even the early 80's. In those days the NCAI convention was a four-day party. If you go to NCAI now and there are a few guys who will sneak off and drink—but they have to sneak off and drink. You don't hang around in NCAI and booze like you did twenty years ago.

Our leadership is getting better. They realize the nature of this issue and the harm it does in their community. Yet, still, it seems to me that sober leadership in the new millennium has to mean something more. This last millennium was pretty hard on us and that's where all this generational trauma comes in. We have to really begin to understand how that works in our communities and in our own lives. The most distressing thing to me is how we have ritualized these diseases of alcoholism, of suicide, of violence against women, on the reservations.

When we talk about Native American culture it's good to see the kinds of ritual we saw here tonight with the Hoop and the Color Guard. Those are all good parts of our culture, but if we are going to be honest we have to acknowledge that there is a very ugly side of our culture right now. A very ugly side of the way that we live. That side, too, has its ritual. Both alcohol and suicide have become part of our culture, and it's a part we have to acknowledge and we have to eliminate.

When I was Assistant Secretary, we suggested that President Clinton issue a Presidential apology to the Indian Nations when he went to visit the Oglalas at Pine Ridge. But apologies get very political. This is a country that finds it difficult to officially apologize for slavery. It is a country that finds it very difficult to apologize for genocide. So we weren't able to get the President to do that because it was too loaded politically. So we did it ourselves in a speech that was reprinted by the various news media.

This all began when my wife Anne Marie showed me a book by Marianne Williamson, a non Indian person who is very committed to wellness. In a book called Illuminata was something called "An Apology to Native Americans." When Anne Marie read that to me I was very surprised about the depth of the emotional reaction I had to that. I had been saying, "I'm tough, that's old stuff. I don't have to deal with that. I'm past it." When I heard that I realized I was not past it. It's still at work in me. I still respond to those images. I can't see the pictures of Chief Bigfoot's band at Wounded Knee without crying. I just can't. In some profound way, we still relate to those generations of our people who suffered in that way. I wondered what we can do to try to overcome that. The reality is that the Bureau of Indian Affairs can do almost nothing, but it can be helpful. What I tried to teach the Bureau to do was to stay out of the way and let the tribes do what they needed to do. To help them and then get out of the way.

When I wrote the apology speech I asked myself what it was young people needed to know. They needed to know that we didn't deserve what happened to us. We did not deserve that. Our young people feel it too. They already inherited all that has happened to us. They already inherited that sense of loss, that shame, that guilt. The best than can be done is for us to remind them constantly that they don't deserve to live the way that we the adults are forcing them to live. Our people way back when did not deserve what happened to them. They need to hear that, and they need to hear that over and over again. The best we can do is to get the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to say you didn't deserve this. There was nothing about you as Indian people that justified what happened in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It was my intention to say that in my apology speech as loudly and as clearly as possible.

I hope that all of you take every opportunity to tell our young people that we didn't deserve what happened. There is nothing wrong with us that can explain what it is that happened to our people. I also hope you take every opportunity to tell them that alcohol or drugs can give them nothing as a young person.

This is Our Sober Leadership
This brings me to my final point about sober leadership in the new millennium. When I was in my twenties or early thirties, and knew everything, I wanted to be a big shot. I wanted to be a leader. I wanted power. I wanted to be important. I wanted people to say, "Boy, he's important!" And I got that. I worked real hard for it and I paid a dear price for it. I lost 20 years of my adulthood to it. I do a lot of reading. I read a lot of spiritual stuff, a lot of history, a lot of everything. I read a lot of AA literature and I read the Bible.

One day I was reading the Psalms and trying to figure it out because they are about war. They say things like, God guide my hands to smite my enemy. So I wondered what kind of religion this is. The only way it began to make any sense to me is to view it all as a metaphor. This is not about the struggle we have with our enemies out there, but the struggle we have with our enemies in here. If I read those things in that light then they begin to make sense.

I've further come to realize that the only battle I can win, the only power that is important, the only battle, indeed, that's worth fighting, is to fight the battle within myself to try to be a good person. That's what all of you here at this conference are about as well.

This, right here in this room, including many others like us, is the sober leadership for the new millennium.

Those of you who feel the urge to serve as a tribal leader, as a sober person—do it! Please do it. Go out there and do it. The sober leadership for the new millennium, what's going to change the way Indian people live on the reservations, is for people like you to lead by example. To lead by leading good and healthy lives. To lead by not permitting alcohol and drugs in your homes. To lead by honoring your spouses and treating them with the respect and the love that they deserve. To lead by teaching sobriety to your children, and to all children who come within your influence. If your children stray, do whatever it takes to get them back on the road.

My wife and I have had that experience and it's hard. It makes you want to cry, but you've got to do it. You lead by being honest in how we deal with one another. It's not funny to lie to each other. It's not funny to gossip about each other. We have to lead by not doing those things. We lead by being compassionate toward everyone, not just Indian people, but to everyone whom we come in contact with. We lead by living lives of integrity, where our actions and our words reflect the values that we all profess in places like this conference. We always extend, of course, a helping hand to those who are seeking wellness themselves.

My last thought is this. When we got together for my grandmother's funeral there was something going on in the family about who had cut their hair and who hadn't. One member of the family had cut his hair and was talking to a couple of us who had also cut our hair. He said we had cut our hair but we didn't do it in the traditional way. He said that in order to do this right you have to have a chief cut your hair. So I got to thinking about it later.

I had my wife cut my hair. I have another family member who is also sober and she had somebody else cut her hair. She was a little bit worried about this idea that we hadn't done it in a traditional way. When I thought it all the way through, I said to myself, "We are chiefs!" We are chiefs because we are sober. We are trying to live in a good way. We're not hurting anybody. We are trying to teach our children to be sober. We are trying to teach everybody who comes into contact with us to live a good way, to be sober, to not drink, to not lose that internal battle. And that makes us chiefs. So we are entitled to make that decision.

We are in a time now when each and every one of us must learn to live as chiefs—because the only thing any one of us has any control over is ourselves. If we win that battle, then we are chiefs, and we will be the sober leadership for the new millennium.

Thank you very much for listening to me.

Kevin Gover (Pawnee) is the former Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the Clinton Administration. He is a professor of law, and an affiliate professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University.