We Already Know How to Share

Some habits are taught to us so early we forget they were ever taught at all. We think we were simply born knowing them. Sharing is one of those. Long before a child can read, they learn — from the people around them — whether a full hand is meant to stay closed or to open. Native America learned to open the hand a very long time ago. And that is not a soft story about the past. It is the most practical thing I can tell you about the future.

BEFORE THERE WAS A UNITED STATES

Before there was a United States, there were nations here who had already worked out something the rest of the world was still arguing about: how a people can be free and take care of each other at the same time.

The Haudenosaunee — the Six Nations, the people of the longhouse — governed themselves under the Great Law of Peace, the Gayanashagowa, a living constitution of councils, checks, and consent. And woven right into it was an economy built on a startling idea: that wealth is measured not by what you pile up, but by what you give away. Goods moved by need. The clans held the land in trust through the women, for the generations not yet born. And the leaders — the chiefs — were often the poorest among their people, because a chief who kept the most had failed, and a chief who gave the most had succeeded.

Sit with how radical that is. A whole system of government and economy, running on generosity as its engine — while Europe was brainwashed to believe such a thing was impossible for “savages.”

Hold onto that image — because you are about to learn that it never died.

IT NEVER DIED — I WATCHED IT WITH MY OWN EYES

You do not have to reach back to the seventeenth century to find it. Even in my own lifetime, in a third-world corner of Oklahoma, I watched poor tribal people take care of one another. They had almost nothing — and still the hand opened. A family without went home with something. That was not charity handed down from above. It was the old habit, still breathing, still doing its quiet work.

They were poor — nearly all of them — right up until the casinos came and created better opportunities.

And what I have watched since then, I have watched with pleasure: the rebirth of Native America. Not a rescue. A return — to a strength that was always there, now with the resources to show itself again.

THE PROOF IS ALREADY ON THE GROUND

Here is the part people outside Indian Country still do not know: the sharing didn’t just come back for show. It came back at scale, tribe to tribe, in dollars.

The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Minnesota — one of the most successful gaming tribes in the country — has given more than $400 million in grants to other tribal nations and lent hundreds of millions more, tribe to tribe, so that a Nation with less can build what a Nation with more already has. They call this work wóokiye — to help, to be an ally. The old word for a new scale of giving.

The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel, in California, have given hundreds of millions the same way. The Cherokee Nation and the Chickasaw Nation reinvest enormous sums into health, housing, language, and education — for their own citizens and, again and again, beyond their own borders. And it moves through real machinery, not good intentions alone: direct grants, tribe-to-tribe loans, and state revenue-sharing funds like California’s, where the more fortunate gaming tribes feed a pool that steadies the smaller ones.

That is the Great Law of Peace, wearing a modern suit. The chief who gives the most.

THE REAL CHALLENGE ISN’T THE MONEY

So let me say the thing plainly: for a growing part of Native America, the challenge is no longer making the money. The challenge is respecting our sovereignty and our collected histories for our children — protecting who we are while we build what comes next.

And the old people already left us the tool for that, too. They called it the longhouse. We just build them bigger now.

THE MODERN LONGHOUSE

Look at the coalitions Native America has raised up: the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and largest voice for tribal nations. The Association on American Indian Affairs. The United South and Eastern Tribes. The Inter-Tribal Councils of Michigan, of California, and beyond. The Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council, bringing the herds home. The Native American Rights Fund, defending sovereignty in the courts. The First Nations Development Institute, rebuilding Native economies from the ground up.

Every one of them is a longhouse — many fires under one roof, many nations at one council, deciding together what no single Nation could carry alone. The form is centuries old. The reach is brand new.

WHAT WE ACTUALLY SHARE

But if you think this is only about money, you have missed the heart of it.

The importance of sharing is more than monetary wealth. It is knowledge. It is education. It is opportunity. It is economic development, and self-respect, and the raising up of our people of the future — with the very character and the very disciplines of those whose footsteps we honor and follow.

Which brings us to the most important thing a Nation can build. Not a casino. Not a tower. A leader.

THE NEXT TURN: OUR SOVEREIGNTY IS BEST PROTECTED BY THE PEOPLE WE SEND FORWARD

Our sovereignty is best protected not only by what we already know, but by producing America’s future leaders. Future mayors. Future governors. Future senators. Future Supreme Court justices. And, one day, a President.

THE CLIMB

Here is the part that matters most — and the part that is only just beginning.

Native Americans are roughly three in every hundred people in this country. For most of America’s history, the number of Native faces in its highest offices wasn’t three in a hundred — it was closer to none in a thousand. That gap is not an accident, and it is not a verdict. It is a canyon that a whole people is now, at last, crossing.

And look who has already reached the far rim.

Charles Curtis — Kaw Nation, raised partly on the reservation, speaking Kansa and French before he spoke English — rose to become Vice President of the United States, 1929 to 1933. To this day no Native person has held a higher federal office. It happened once. It can happen again — and next time, it does not have to be the ceiling.

Then, for a long stretch, the door stuck. It took until 2018 for the first two Native women — Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland — to win seats in Congress at all. But watch how fast the rim filled in once they crossed it.

Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, became the first Native American ever to lead a Cabinet department — Secretary of the Interior, the very agency that once governed Native people from the outside, now run by one of their own.

Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba, Chief of the Mohegan Tribe, became the first Native American Treasurer of the United States. Her signature now appears on the nation’s currency — a Native woman’s name printed on American money.

Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, serves as Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota — among the highest-ranking Native women ever to hold state executive office.

Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, was confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security in March 2026 — the second Native American ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency. Proof that Haaland was not a single lightning strike, but the start of weather.

Tom Cole, Chickasaw, has served in the U.S. House since 2003 — the longest-serving Native American in the history of Congress — and now chairs the House Appropriations Committee, the panel that holds the federal government’s purse. Beloved at home and returned to office term after term, he stands at the very center of how America decides where its money goes.

And this is not new, either — it is a return. Robert Owen, Cherokee, was one of Oklahoma’s first United States Senators, and he helped write the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 — the law that built the modern American economy. A Native man helped design the country’s money more than a century ago. Two Chickasaws and one Cherokee, a hundred years apart, shaping how America handles its money — Owen building the Federal Reserve, Cole holding the purse today.

Here is the deepest truth beneath all of it: when a Native leader walks into the United States Capitol, they are not a newcomer to democracy. They are coming home to it. The Haudenosaunee — the Six Nations whose Great Law of Peace we opened with — built a working, representative confederacy on this soil centuries before the U.S. Constitution was drafted. In 1988, Congress itself formally acknowledged that the Iroquois Confederacy helped shape the very government of the United States. The ideas America calls its own were, in part, learned here first.

So the climb is not Native people asking to be let into someone else’s house. It is Native people returning to a house their ancestors helped build.

That is why the goal cannot stop at one senator, or one Cabinet chair, or one name on a dollar bill. The goal is the whole climb — future mayors, future governors, future senators, future Supreme Court justices, and yes, one day, a President. Not as a favor. As a homecoming.

AND THIS IS WHERE THE NEW TOOL COMES IN

There is a new technology in the room now — artificial intelligence — and every generation, a new tool arrives that the powerful hope the rest of us won’t learn in time. This one is learnable, in plain language, by anyone willing to sit down with it. Used right, it does not replace the grandmother, the chief, or the council. It hands them leverage — a way for a small Nation to research, write, plan, and compete like a large one. The rule is the same as it has always been: you stay the boss. The tool serves the people. Not the other way around.

BEFORE THE FINALE, SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ME

It’s important that you know that I was not born or raised as Native of North America. However, my mother is a Native of Central America, and she married a white man who grew up poor among the Seminole people — and he loved and respected them until the day he died.

So I do not stand here claiming a seat that isn’t mine. I stand here as someone raised close enough to the fire to feel its heat, and to know that its warmth was never meant to be hoarded. The abuse and poverty of the past is still a wound that may never completely close. A history that should never let anyone change as Native America continues to grow in stature.

THIS IS MY COUNTRY

I was born in America. And here is the truth that a great many Native children are still not taught to say out loud, and must be:

This is not a country your people were let into. This is the country your people were already standing in when everyone else arrived. Treated as second-class citizens on your own ground — and still, you served this nation honorably, always. Native Americans have served in the U.S. armed forces at the highest per-capita rate of any group in the country — and served, and bled, for this land before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act even recognized you as citizens of it. You defended a country that had not yet agreed to call you its own.

So there is no one on this soil with more standing to say it.

Now, more than ever, is the time for all the citizens of Native America to strive in unison to make the changes that will matter most — and it must start at the cradle, in what we teach the smallest child from the day it is born: the plain, unbreakable truth, taught as the first habit of all —

“This is MY country.”

Now, go lead the way!

Addendum: The ones who already led the way

A partial honor roll — for the children, so they know whose footsteps they walk in.

Sacagawea (Lemhi Shoshone) — guided the Lewis and Clark expedition across a continent with an infant on her back, and helped open the West that a young nation would not have survived without.

The Code Talkers — Navajo, Comanche, Choctaw, and more — whose languages, which this country once tried to beat out of Native children, became the one code America’s enemies could never break in two world wars.

Ely S. Parker (Seneca) — Union general, the man who penned the terms of surrender at Appomattox, and the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Charles Curtis (Kaw) — Vice President of the United States.

Maria Tallchief (Osage) — America’s first great prima ballerina, who made the world’s stages bow.

Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox) — Olympic gold medalist, named the greatest all-around athlete of the twentieth century.

Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) — first woman elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, who rebuilt a people’s confidence along with their institutions.

Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba (Mohegan) — the first Native Cabinet Secretary, and the first Native Treasurer of the United States, whose name rides on the money in your pocket.

They did not wait to be given the country. They led it. So can the child you raise tomorrow.