Pulse of the Bay Episode 6 – Philomena Kebec

Recorded: April 6, 2025

Summary

In this episode of Pulse of the Bay, host Fred Clark speaks with Philomena Quebec, an attorney and member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. They discuss Philomena’s journey from growing up in Minneapolis to her impactful work in economic development, harm reduction, and community health within tribal communities. The conversation highlights the challenges of substance abuse, the importance of tribal sovereignty, and the need for community-centered approaches to health and economic development. Philomena shares her vision for inspiring future generations and the significance of maintaining cultural values while addressing contemporary issues.

Takeaways 

• Philomena Quebec is dedicated to improving health and economic development in tribal communities.
• The opioid crisis has significantly impacted tribal communities, leading to a rise in overdose cases.
• Harm reduction programs are essential for saving lives and providing resources to those struggling with substance use.
• Community-centered approaches that incorporate Anishinaabe spirituality can enhance the effectiveness of health programs.
• Tribal sovereignty is crucial for self-governance and the ability to address community needs effectively.
• The relationship between tribes and the U.S. government is complex and requires ongoing advocacy and education.
• Economic development initiatives are vital for creating jobs and improving living conditions in tribal areas.
• Collaboration with organizations like Vital Strategies can provide necessary funding and support for health initiatives.
• Mentorship and education are key to empowering the next generation of tribal leaders.
• Maintaining cultural values while addressing modern challenges is essential for the future of tribal communities.

Sound Bites

“You’re clearly giving attorneys a good name.”

“I promised her I would.”

“We wanted to keep people alive.”

“We have to have people alive to be able to take care of the functions.”

“We should really ask you to read this.”

“We have a lot of love that we share between our communities.”

“We need to figure out how to employ people and have jobs.”

“We can’t be giving away our water.”

“It’s the most beautiful place on earth.”

“I want to be of service to the next generation.”

Resources

Philomena-kebec Biography 

Tribal Nations of Wisconsin 

The Bad River Tribe 

Philomena featured in Harm Reduction in Action 

Bad River featured in Harm Reduction Program

Next Distro / Wisconsin 

Substance Abuse Mental Health Administration

Federal Cuts to Tribal Programs

Indian Law Resource Center 

Transcript

Fred Clark (00:08.097)

Well, hello and welcome to Pulse of the Bay. It’s the news and public affairs show from 97.7 FM WVCB LP in Ashland, Wisconsin. We are the voice of Chequamegon Bay.  WVCB FM is community radio. Our programming, our music, news, documentary and discussion strengthens our sense of place and connection among the communities along the south shore of Lake Superior. You can check us out at WBCB.org

I’m Fred Clark, one of your hosts for Pulse of the Bay. Pulse of the Bay is a program for sharing news, events, and in-depth discussions with interesting people of all kinds throughout the South Shore and the Chequamegon Bay region. 

And I’m here today especially excited to talk with Philomena Kebec. Philomena, welcome to the show. 

Philomena 

Really glad to be here. Thank you, Fred. 

Fred 

Thank you so much. It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re sitting here at the Chequamegon Food Co-op here in Ashland at the perfect beginning of spring day. So, Philomena is an attorney and a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, where she serves as the Director of Economic Development.

For more than a decade, she has worked on building systems and support for harm reduction and overdose prevention, improving tribal health care, and helping small businesses grow and access financing, and improving access to local and traditional foods and other work that helps strengthen health and well-being for tribal communities.

Philomena is also an attorney and a judge. She’s licensed to practice law in tribal and state courts. And among other roles, she currently serves as the chief judge for the Sokoagan Chippewa community at Mole Lake. And in fact, as I learned earlier today, last year, the Wisconsin State Bar Association named Philomena the Pro Bono Attorney of the Year.   

Philomena, you’re clearly giving attorneys a good name.

Philomena 

Thank you so much. You know, that’s probably the greatest public service that I offer. Yeah. 

Fred

Okay. Well, I’m sure your colleagues at the Wisconsin Bar Association appreciate that.

Well, welcome. I’m so glad that we’re able to talk today. And maybe let’s just start by, tell us about your journey? Where did you grow up and what sort of path led you to where you are today with the Bad River Tribe? 

Philomena 

Sure. That sounds great. I’ve, you know, since I was a little baby, I’ve been a member of the Bad River Band. Like many of us, I grew up off the reservation in a city. I grew up in Minneapolis. And I always really yearned to develop a stronger connection with Bad River. That was something that I always wanted, and I didn’t really know how to do that. was one of the important values in my family is education. My two grandmothers were teachers, and they pushed hard for me to…go to do well in high school, college, and then figure out some kind of graduate degree.

I ended up going to law school in 2005. I graduated in 2008. 

Fred

Where’d you go to school? 

Philomena 

I chose the University of Minnesota because I could stay close to my grandma best. Okay. And so I spent every Sunday with her, no matter what, during law school. And…She liked to play Scrabble. So we would play Scrabble. She would take me out to eat. And we would just joke around and talk to me. She was in her 90s at the time. Was your grandmother a tribal member? Yeah. was born and raised in Odana.

And then she moved away in her 20s because her parents passed away and she needed to work in order to raise her siblings. So yeah, my grandma, she would just tease the heck out of me about going to law school and how she was going to start a life of crime. Because now she had somebody who could defend her.

And but then, know, when she was, you know, we’d have like private conversations and, you know, she told me that she knew that I was going to help Indian people with my degree and my education. And this is when you’re a teenager? No, I was in law school. So I was, you know, I was in my mid-20s. I told her I would. I promised her I would. You she ended up passing away the week after she heard that I passed the bar exam. 

Then it became my…driving force to fulfill my promise to her. You know, that was the thing that motivated me the most. And I graduated in 2008. There were no lots, jobs. I mean, the job market was just trash. 

Fred 

Just right in the midst of the recession. 

Philomena 

Right in the midst of the recession. I ended up working for a state court judge and I was a law clerk. I wasn’t making enough money to pay my bills. So I had this big struggle.

I knew I could figure out a way to make it, I could always take a second or third job on, but I wanted to figure out how to fulfill my promise to my grandma. And I ended up in Washington, D.C. working for the Indian Law Resource Center with Tim Coulter. This is like a premier international law organization.  And, I loved it. We were doing really cutting edge work. 

But what I found out was that in Bad River, I needed to come home because we had to protect our community from the Gogebic Taconite project.  In 2011, I ended up quitting my job at Indian Law Resource Center, coming back home, working for the tribe, and doing…

You know we were doing a lot of advocacy, was so much fun. I we were really concerned about this project and the impact of this project. was huge. But it was really fun also. And we were able to…You know, I was able to do stuff with my law degree that just none of my colleagues could do. Being kind of at the beginning of their law degree. We were building a social movement. were creating messaging.

Because all of us had to become geologists at that point. And it’s such a galvanizing moment, 

Fred 

So galvanizing. The focus of the state and the whole region was on the Bad River. Tribal members leadership and Mike Wiggins leadership were incredible. 

Philomena

Absolutely. And New York’s was just… Yeah, and it was just a really wonderful time. So I was doing that, you know, and it was some lost stuff, but it was mostly public relations. 

Fred 

And were you working for the tribe? 

Philomena 

I was working for the tribe as a staff attorney for the tribe. And then I was doing some, like we were creating some laws, you know, and I was working in, I started working in child welfare. So I took on a child welfare caseload. And this is where I became intimately aware of the…of what we’re seeing in our.. in our community with respect to drugs. we were like during that time it was a shift from prescription pills and really easily accessible opioids. know, it’s your prescriptions. Oxycontin and Percocet and you know, like all these different, all these different formulations that were pharmaceutical drugs that were still dangerous because you know, you can, you can overdose on them, but less dangerous than we see now because they were regulated and and

was marked on the bottle. And they were in fact being prescribed. And they were being prescribed and you know a lot of people got them secondhand but there was you know it was a it was a regulated drug supply. 

Fred 

So you could survive Oxycontin? 

Philomena

Yeah people you know people people get overdose but if you knew what you were doing it was was harder to overdose you know and so Then in the early 2010s, the… state and federal regulators started figuring out that this was going to be a problem, know, the over prescription of these drugs, the over availability of these drugs, and it certainly was, but then everyone just got caught off. So the supply dried up immediately. And this is when heroin, like black market heroin became much more available and was, it took care of people in a different way. What’s difficult about that shift is that this is an unregulated drug and the potency is unknown upon purchase. 

Fred 

Where’s most of that heroin coming from? Is it being manufactured in the US? 

Philomena

We don’t have heroin anymore. You can’t find it. You can’t find it anywhere really. So the heroin was coming from overseas or different countries across land boundaries or water boundaries. Probably a lot of the heroin that we had here was coming from Mexico.

So that was, you know, that was what I was seeing. And so my whole caseload, for the most part, was parents who got caught up in the criminal legal system ended up in jail, lost custody of their kids. Or there was a housing eviction case. because of drug use, and they lost custody of their kids. I only had one or two cases that involved actual tangible abuse of the children. So it was a lot of criminal processes, civil processes that ended up in kids and families getting into children’s court.

What was very difficult about these cases, there were many aspects of the cases that were very difficult. Governments, state and tribal governments who take children from their parents’ custody have an obligation to provide them with services to rehabilitate themselves and regain custody of their kids. 

With the real limited resources in tribal communities, there’s often just not a lot of services and support that can be provided to these parents. And, you know, of course, it’s really important for tribes to maintain jurisdiction, but tribes also need access to more resources, more services. We’re seeing that now. We see we have a much better system. We have much better systems today. But in the early 2010s, it was it just seemed like we were going through the motions.

Fred Clark (12:56.102)

And then you described through the heroin phase, but then that’s really shifted to even more opiates and more deadly drugs, so the synthetics came along later. So in the later 2010s, like synthetics, like the fentanyl and… a lot of poly drug use, so using methamphetamine and fentanyl in combination together or you know like maybe…having like some people, some people will do like a bunch of, will do heroin for a while and then switch to methamphetamine or vice versa. And then some people do it in tandem.

You know like in the same day some people do them together. like there’s there’s a lot of you know There’s a lot of polysubstance abuse or use you know.

Fred 

I read a in one of the articles in which you were featured, tell me if I’ve got this correct that you were seeing as many as 30 overdoses in a month that would not have been an unusual number. 

Philomena

Oh, yeah Yeah, there’s well I don’t have I don’t have it narrowed down to the zip code, but so I’m talking These data are regional data. yeah, 30 to 40 overdoses. These are overdose reversals. There’s a medication called Naloxone, which is a great medication. It has no side effects really. The only thing it does is it blocks the opioid receptors. It stops them from working and that means when the opioids get kicked off, the receptor, the lungs start working, and people can resume breathing. So naloxone is a really great medication. When we first started our program, so this was, we first started looking into harm reduction around 2014.

And that’s also the year that I left my position at the tribe. And I started working for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. So I was working for GLIFWC. I didn’t have the heart to do child welfare after a while. It was very, just a lot of vicarious trauma. And I didn’t feel like we were getting a lot of results. We weren’t getting good results for kids and families. So it was frustrating.

I moved down to Glyphwick and I do treaty rights work, but Aurora, my good friend, my ride or die best friend here in Bad River, we- Aurora Connolly. Aurora Connolly, yeah. Born and raised in Bad River. We started working on building a harm reduction program here in our community. And so part of it was- Part of the work was figuring out what were the, where did the tools of the trade? 

You know, and, we knew that there was like a drug that reversed our overdose. We didn’t know what it was, what it was called, how it worked, or how we could get it. But then we figured out all those things, you know, and we got a lot of help from many different people and they would just send us free naloxone in the beginning, clandestine. 

You know, this was, this was before naloxone was deregulated. But we just, knew we had to get it out to people because it was life or death. 

Fred 

Yeah. And you were really starting…starting your own program almost from scratch to do this. 

Philomena

 Yeah, we had nothing. We had nothing. We didn’t even know what we needed. But you wanted to keep people, we wanted people alive and we wanted to be a resource, right? Yeah. Because I think just putting people in jail doesn’t work. It just cuts them off from the resources that they would need in order to recover from substance use

Telling people they have to quit doesn’t always work or doesn’t often work. Yeah, it’s not, those things are not really effective. And just taking away their kids and expecting them to be able to put their lives back together when you take away kids and housing. Yeah.

It’s hard to get housing without kids. It’s hard to get your kids back without housing. can’t, you know? So there’s just these gourd, like, you know, these knots that are created. Right? They’re like impossible knots. So you’re trying to keep families together wherever possible. Yeah. I mean, you know, like I came from a lot of trauma in my family and over to two, we know what that’s like, but we stayed with our moms. And that was really important for us. Being able to stay with our parents, even if our parents aren’t perfect, is…a marked reduction in trauma for kids. 

Fred

Sure. And you started this program that you’ve been describing. Am I correct that you have scaled that to providing some services statewide? Yeah. Consulting with other tribes and sort of showing the successes you’ve had? Yeah. So in 2022, 2021, I came back to Bad River and started working with the tribe in economic development. so, you know, the work that I was doing was really about figuring out how we could make money and provide workforce and solving some of the economic challenges that we’ve, economic and community infrastructure challenges. 

So during this time, River, now Bad River has an internet service provider you know been like those kinds of things internet service provider we’ve been investing in our water and sewer and our electrical systems. We have a new health clinic. We new health clinic. have you know we’ve been working on our roads to improve our roads. You know all these things are just like really fundamental for the for our core economic functions. Keeping people from dying of overdose is in that same category. We have to have people alive to be able to take care of the functions that we need to run a government and have an economy. So it’s really fundamental. 

Fred 

If you’ll let me, I’d like to read something that you wrote just a few weeks ago. just found this to be so powerful.

This was regarding work that you were doing on the Bad River. And you said, “So many good feelings working in a program where we center Anishinaabe Spirituality.”

We should really ask you to read this!  Would you be willing to read this for us? 

Philomena

Happy to. There’s so many good feelings working in a program where we center Anishinaabe spirituality. We had ceremonies at Harm Reduction, at our Harm Reduction Center this week, smelling the medicines, hearing the laughter and happy children, enjoying sharing food together, watching everyone caring for our shared space by washing the dishes, cleaning the floors, folding up the lodge tarps, feeling unified, our love healing us.

Fred

Thank you for reading that so much better than I would have. But it just felt so powerful to me that it seemed to capture what drives you, what motivates you to do this work. 

Philomena

A lot of things have been coming together. We’ve, you know, in 2022 we received a very…

generous contribution from an organization called Vital Strategies. And this is one of the Bloomberg Foundation organizations. And Vital Strategies works globally to address critical healthcare issues, critical health issues within specific communities for a short period of time. 

So we have a five year partnership with Vital Strategies. They provided us with organizational funding so that we could hire our first staff. then in turn, we promised to do a bunch of things, including starting a mail service harm reduction program. 

So people can go to our partners website nextdistro.org. 

Fred 

We’ll put that in the show notes too. 

Philomena

And order naloxone and also other harm reduction supplies.

So the orders go in the next just our website and they get spit out over our program. And we have people that read all the requests one by one and they read all the notes in the request. And they send out naloxone and handwritten notes. 

Fred

And that’s for tribal members, non-tribal members? 

Philomena

It’s for everybody in Wisconsin. everyone in Wisconsin. And I know I don’t have my 22, 24 numbers just

in my head right now, but in 2023 we fulfilled over 3,000 requests throughout the state and we know that the Naloxone is being used for good, right? It’s being used to reverse overdoses all over the state. I think 63 counties in Wisconsin, we’ve served it, we’ve served. And the majority of our Naloxone is going to rural counties where they they don’t have easy access to naloxone through other methods. 

Fred

Is there any other program in the state that does anything similar?  Or would I have to walk into a clinic somewhere? 

Philomena

You generally have to walk into like a brick and mortar clinic. There’s some programs that a lot of health departments have naloxone available now. Many communities have naloxone vending machines also. So it’s becoming more available. I’m concerned about the shifts in federal policy away from investment into things like community distributed naloxone.

The shifts at HHS are really concerning because all the naloxone funding is either coming from SAMHSA or the CDC. And tell people about SAMHSA. Sure. SAMHSA is the Substance Abuse Mental Health Administration. It’s a department of HHS. And it was recently gutted, with most of, most if not all of their staff fired. I think there’s some staff that are left.

But SAMHSA administers millions of dollars in block grant funding and specific programs that are being used for the purchase of naloxone. And other really vital things like our 988 system is a SAMHSA program. 988 is the suicide hotline. So if anybody is concerned about suicide, having suicidal thoughts, they can call 988 and talk to someone who can get them resources. 

This is really critical, very important. 

Fred 

And where does that program live? Who manages it? 

Philomena

That program is a SAMHSA program. it lives in each state. American Indian, Alaska Native individuals have the highest rate of overdose fatality. And that’s been true since at least 2018.

So the influx of synthetic opioids has been really, has impacted American Indian, Alaska Native folks most acutely. For a long time, we’ve also had the highest rates of suicide. so these programs at CDC and at SAMHSA that are specific to these, of these topic areas are really important for tribal people. 

Fred 

Yeah, critical. So you moved us into that part of the discussion, which is…

something we really want to cover that and I think in the mainstream media at least there’s maybe not been as much coverage of changes from Doge and the Trump administration and how those have affected or are affecting tribal communities and we’ve all heard that the BIA office here in Ashland is going to close well most people have no idea what happens there but tell us about other ways in which tribes are being affected right now by changes or things you see coming that we should be aware

Philomena

So I’d to back up just a minute and give a bit of a history lesson. 

Fred 

Yes, please!.

Philomena

The United States has a very complex relationship with tribal nations. Since the beginning of the founding of the United States, this country wasn’t founded on virgin territory. There were people living here with pre-existing governments.

These governments were not like the United States. We didn’t have the kind of technology the United States has. But still had all the aspects of government. I we engaged in diplomacy, in warfare, in agriculture, in public safety and lawmaking and legislating within our own societies, right?  And so the active founding of the country, there was an understanding that the United States had to respect the sovereignty of these pre-existing nations. And this is reflected in the structure of our constitution. Commerce with the Indian tribes is regulated in the same way it is with as foreign nations.

There’s some great case law that was developed by Chief Justice John Marshall at the beginning of the very beginning of the founding of the country. And Chief Justice John Marshall really looked at Indian tribes the same way as…as these little fiefdoms in Europe. So at that time, there was a lot of changing of boundaries in Europe. And so they created the Law of Nations. The Law of Nations was developed to assure peace and rights, assure that smaller nations continue to have rights, even if they got subsumed by larger nations. 

Fred

So if you look at a map of Europe at the time of the founding of the United States, it looks completely different. Lots of principalities. Lots of principalities, right? Germany was a totally Normandy and Prussia was all over the place, right?

Philomena

Chief Judge John Marshall really looked at the relationship with Indian tribes in a similar way and so created case law that’s still good today that respects the internal sovereignty of tribes. So tribes get to make their own decisions, have their own governments. The thing that tribes cannot do is engage in war, engage in diplomacy, or sell their land to another

country. know, like at Bad River we can’t sell our land to Italy, right? But we maintain all of our internal self-governance, we can create laws and…govern our economy and all that kind of stuff. that’s the framework upon which the United States built its Indian policy. So, I mean, a lot of people forget this. And so oftentimes there’s been this retreat back into this assimilationist policy. So we want to just treat Indians like everybody else. We’re going to forget the obligations that we have under federal and international law. But then there’s a reconciliation. 

So that’s what we see throughout Indian policy through the 20th century. We get to the Nixon administration in 1973. And there was just turmoil with AIM and all the activism that was happening. And what the Nixon administration knew is that we need to strengthen tribal governance so that they can take care of this. All this stuff that’s happening. 

Fred 

And was this the beginning of the Indian Self-Determination Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, which provided tribes the opportunity to contract with the federal government in order to fulfill the services that the federal government is obligated to provide for their citizens, as opposed to the federal government and federal employees doing that work directly, right?

Philomena

Right, right. And so, you know, it became that, you know, the Indian Self-Determination Act is like a seed. And then if it’s planted in a tribal community…the tribe can take over its land department, its natural resources department, its social services departments, its health departments. And then the seed flourishes and grows. What we have in BIA right now is a lot of contract administration that happens there. The BIA is also unfortunately involved in a lot of land transactions. 

And so the BIA is isn’t controlled probate and regular land transactions. I think there’s a lot of reforms that are needed within the BIA. 

Fred 

Does it include management of the allotted lands? 

Philomena

yes. So all the trust lands get administered by the BIA and it is a real time drag on transactions.

I mean, I could go into stories about that. We have a lot of abandoned houses in Bad River. And the ownership status of these homes and their areas is a little bit unknown. Our probate process takes up to six years. And so this means that there’s…This has a real impact on our ability to have homes on our reservations and then to, on public safety, all kinds of things. 

So this is, I mean, it’s a problem in and of itself. I don’t think the problem is to gut the BIA and get rid of all its employees. That’s going to make it worse. There, we need to do some regulatory reform. And, know, I think…This administration is interested in changing things. And there’s real changes that need to happen with some of the BIA regulations. And we should be doing that. But we’re going to need people in order to implement that. So getting rid of the BIA at the local level is…is not the direction that is needed right now. 

Fred 

Right. Well, especially when so much of the work that BIA does is administer the grants, correct? 

Philomena

Exactly. tribal self-determination and the work that you all are doing and housing and human services. Yeah. You know, what can happen happens on the state side of things. The state also contracts with us to provide services either to our community or more globally.

That’s what my program does. The state contracting process is very delayed. And what that means is our funds won’t get released until nine months into the contract period. So we’ll have maybe three months to do all the spending. And that means the programming is subject to real stop and start, which is not ideal if we’re dealing with a crisis. Like the overdose crisis is a crisis. six months of interruption of those services. Nine months of interruption is not, that’s not, and you know we’re trying to, we try to maintain continuity, but when we can’t have access to the funds, this means that we have cash flow issues. 

I’m very concerned about cash flow issues. With what we’re seeing at the BIA. Because if we don’t have consistency in funding, don’t have separate pots to draw on. Something that you alluded to earlier that I think is so important is that the responsibility of the federal government, what you would describe as the Indian Federal Trust responsibility of the United States government is anchored in law and precedence.

Fred 

and the fact that 23 year olds in Doge who are getting hold of databases and cutting programs off may have no idea about that history or that obligation. 

Philomena

Right, and I think what we’re concerned about is being lumped into this category of diversity, equity, inclusion when these…

There might be some tribal programs that would fall into a DEI kind of category, but for the most part, we’re talking about a long-standing commitment of the federal government to support tribal nations in carrying out our governmental activities in consideration for the land that we provided them. This is a contract. We had millions of acres of land that were ceded to the United States in a series of transactions, treaties, that are the supreme law of the land. 

You know, for those areas of land, was a promise that we would be able to continue to carry out our governmental activities to keep up with our lifestyle as an Inishinabee. 

Fred 

So, this is not discretionary, this is a solemn commitment that our government made. 

Philomena

Absolutely. 

Fred 

We know, just yesterday there were something like 700 or 1,000 people protesting just a few blacks from here in Ashland. And I think people around this region are going to want to pay very close attention to seeing that those promises are kept. 

Philomena

Absolutely. I mean, the tribal, I mean, it’s not just the, I don’t think what we do doesn’t have impacts. isn’t like what we do here as tribal nations. Like the impact that we have isn’t just within our own community and tribal members. We employ a lot of people. Yeah.

And then we also provide services to the entire, you know, the teenager region. Through our fisheries, through our water quality programs, through our air quality programs, and you know, and certainly through our programs like our home reduction program. 

Fred 

And really for anyone who’s interested – go to the Bad River government website and look at the breadth of programs that Bad River members and employees provide. It’s really a remarkable asset and you all have a capacity to do things that I think everyone around this region can learn from and benefit from. 

Philomena

Absolutely, absolutely. I think for a very long time Bad River has committed to being part of this community not just because we’re here and we love it and all of that, but because we love our neighbors. And there’s been a lot of…a lot of help back and forth.  You know?  And so we maintain our separateness, of course, and our culture, and that’s really important. But there’s a lot of love that we share between our communities. 

Fred 

Absolutely. Has anyone asked you if the would be interested in taking over Northland College? I say that jokingly, but in all seriousness, I hope that the tribe will be part of discussions about the future for Northland.

Philomena

I’m not privy to those conversations. Those are above my pay grade. 

Fred 

Yeah, absolutely for sure. Well, it’s inspiring and I’m gonna just come back briefly to the state budget then also. So you made reference to the state budget. Of course that work and our biennial budget is coming up right now and our Joint Finance Committee will be holding hearings in Hayward on April 28th. You mentioned a couple of items, what are some of the key provisions in the state budget that are important for the Bad River and other tribes?  Don’t feel like you have to name them all.

Philomena

I think there’s a, I would say all of them. There’s a lot of, as tribal members, we’re also citizens of the state. And so we have a… We have an interest in all the spending that the state is doing and the entire budget. Certainly, the natural resources budget is something that is really important and we pay attention to.

Fred 

Something that you mentioned earlier, I’m just going to take you back to the discussion about mining and the Gogebic Taconite mine that you came back to the Bad River to advocate for a better outcome. it just seems like because of the fact that elected officials turn over frequently, educating people about the relationship that we need to have with tribes as sovereign nations.  There’s often a lot of ignorance or a lot of lack of knowledge that people come to those discussions with. 

Philomena

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think even more important than the relationship, know, our existence as sovereign tribes is each individual’s relationship with the water and with the air, with our earth. That’s important. And, you know, and there’s no industry that should be able to…

receive a portion or the ability to pollute what is needed for life. 

And I think we need to take these, of course we need to have functioning economies and we need to figure out how to employ people and have jobs. That’s so important, right? And that’s really very, very important for tribal nations. I know the Bad River Tribe, we have an unemployment rate that’s three times higher than that of our surrounding communities.

And take into account the many number of people in our community that are just chronically underemployed. so, I mean, we’re acutely aware of the need to have jobs, but we can’t be giving away the future. We can’t be giving away our water.

We can’t be giving away our climate to these industries that just promise us a few like numbers. They’re not even offering that much for us. So I think we have to be very, we have to be really creative in how we’re gonna deal with our workforce challenges. And we can, right? There’s a lot of things that we need in our communities to improve things and figuring out how to make the economics work, how to make sure everyone gets paid, we have good housing for communities, all those things. How do we get more money in our systems is the big question. 

Fred 

Well, and as you said, at the same time, you are stewards of an incredible world class freshwater estuary resource with ecological and spiritual values. And it’s inspiring to everyone from this region who knows about that to see the work that you all are doing.

Philomena

Where we live is really beautiful. It’s the most beautiful place on earth, right? Where we live, it’s so, we have the lakes, it’s incredible. You look out on the lake and every single day it’s like a new masterpiece out there, right? It’s just for us to open our eyes and look at. We’re so lucky. We are, we absolutely are.

Fred 

Philomena, it’s clear that you’ve helped create a lot of change, create a lot of change, and you’ve inspired a lot of people in your work. And your career is not over by a long shot. So just in closing, maybe you could tell us about what are the things that inspire you for the next few years? Or what is it that you would love to see happen that all of us can help contribute to? 

Philomena

So my goal is for this next period of my life is to grow up homegrown leadership. you know…

reverse engineer some of the skills that I’ve been able to develop for my own self and figure out how to create opportunities to teach people about those kinds of things. And so I have a number of people that I mentor. I learn a lot from them as well. I want to be of service to the next generation.

I teach a class at the University of Minnesota Duluth in their masters in tribal governance and administration, their MTAC program. And so I help teach people writing skills and learning about Indian law.

You know, that’s what I want to focus on. I don’t want to go straight too far away from this area. It’s really important for me to be home.  You know, I’m inspired by the young folks growing up because they have a lot of, they have so much to offer, different perspectives and they’re like innately able to communicate to large audiences and…organize. 

And I think that some of the things that I know as an OG organizer might be helpful for them in doing the things that they’re doing. 

Fred 

Well, thank you. Well, it’s clear that this work takes all hands and all skills. And you’re someone who’s bringing both the legal and technical skill set, along with your values as a tribal member and your passion and the love that you sort of exemplify through your work.

So I think something we can all draw inspiration from. So, Philomena, thank you so much. Miigwech. 

Philomena

Thank you, Fred. Miigwech. 

Fred 

I hope to have you back on the show again sometime in the near future with some of your colleagues. 

Philomena

Absolutely. Invite me anytime Fred. 

Fred 

Thank you. We’ll do it. And on behalf of everyone at WBCB, thank you for being with us for Pulse of the Bay. 

Special thanks to our producer Corey Scribner and many other volunteers working hard to establish this small but mighty community resource. You check out our programming and for this story check out our show notes because we’ll have links to some of the things that Philomene has talked about about at wbcb.org. 

And if you find this program valuable, we encourage you to make a donation online and support the station. 

So until next time, let’s all remember to do our part to help all of our communities thrive, protect and conserve our lands and waters, and be kind and caring to the people around us. 

Thank you.