An Open Letter to Van Jones (and others): Part One

My name is Zach Ducheneaux, and I’m the Executive Director of the Intertribal Agriculture Council. We should talk. 

I sincerely appreciate your help in expressing concern for Indian Country. We invite you to join us in our ongoing conversations aimed at changing the fundamental systems that cause Indian Country, and other similarly impoverished communities, to feel even more catastrophic impacts with every single adverse event we experience.

The circumstances of our story take us down a much different path than our contemporaries in other communities, but those paths were all built with the same idea in mind, and have led to the same destination; where we now reside. Ours travels through wars of colonization, thoughtful negotiations of terms by our leaders, land grabs to recruit immigrants, and ultimately having every single treaty abrogated in the name of greed. Our African American brothers and sisters in this cause traveled a very different, yet no less onerous path. We find ourselves at this moment, in this together, from sea to shining sea, with many others; Asian Americans, South Americans, Rural Appalachian Americans, and small farmers and ranchers; just to name a few.

Our long term solutions start with the following. 

Step one, rebuild the entire financial system, starting in our communities. Finance should strike a balance between community and economy, and it should be administered locally. Community should come before profit. Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) like Akiptan, Four Bands Community Fund, and Lakota Funds, among others; do this. The knowledge of, and commitment to, their respective communities, positions them to serve on the front line of this change; but capital is needed.

The challenge they continually face is access to meaningful amounts of capital. Every single CDFI in Indian Country is kept on a starving ration, instead of having access to fair and affordable capital that would allow them to leverage their good intent, and truly deploy their community based staff towards building their solutions that would lead to growth from within. 

Why? Because their access to capital is part of a system that was designed by the very financiers that created the problem they were envisioned to alleviate. Their successful portfolios are built around folks too "risky" for conventional credit; yet they survive. Imagine how they could flourish if they had the capital to serve all.

Let’s have some conversation about the unmet capital need in Indian Country Ag and Food Systems that inspired the creation of Akiptan, Inc., and how filling that need, and rebuilding food economies that serve as the foundation, upon which, we can build ecosystems that unleash the resilience of our people and make us resistant to the next big crisis; all the while truly getting at the root of all of the other issues you mention in your piece. 

Let’s go visit Lakota Vogel at Four Bands Community Fund and find out what magic she must perform to serve over 20 masters, to secure enough funding to keep her staff serving their community and others across the region.

Let’s ask Tawney Brunsch at Lakota Funds about their “cost of funds” as compared to First Interstate Bank (or any other bank for that matter, do you have a savings account?) and how her dedicated team is bringing financial literacy and banking to her homeland.

Let’s ask the same folks and others why federal guarantees don’t work for them, and existing systems aren't working. Let's hear their answers and solutions and work towards them. Let's do that, just to start, and I bet we can find solutions for other communities in need as well. If we can make it work where 14% auto loans are a reality, imagine what we can do elsewhere.

Again, thanks for lending your voice to the problems. Please, help us implement the solutions we’ve identified as well.  Let's visit, my phone number is 605-222-3852, and my email is [email protected].