Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
Before I jump in with today's guest, I want to say a huge thank you to you, our
audience, for helping to make this happen.
I have a request.
If you like what we do here, please give it a thumbs up,
like, subscribe, tell a friend.
It really, really helps us to make the pro.
To find out about our certification courses, online video libraries,
books, and other courses, please go to rupertisaacson.com.
So now let's jump in.
Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free today.
I've got Jeff, Tom Hay.
He's a lawyer, he's Native American.
He has a unique perspective not just on the American experience and, you know,
the world experience of America, but also on the America, within America.
And many of us who are not American, or at least not born there, have a
perception of the USA usually based around what we see coming through
the media of one kind or another.
But the, the truth is that there are many Americans and that the Native
American experience is something that I think is probably unfamiliar, hidden
from most outsiders because it's just not what is presented front and center
in the media experience to the outside world except in certain enclaves of
Hollywood or a film dealing with the American West or something like that.
But even then it would be through the, usually through the perspective of, you
know, a, a non-native film director or so.
So it's great to be able to have, you on Jeff, because you have spent
your life as a lawyer for tribal advocacy, which I suspect probably
has not made you a multimillionaire.
Although I do hope it does one day.
And you are, if I have it right, hada Nation.
Yes.
Same geographic area.
You informed me as the Mandan and Aria Kiri, which those listening
from outside the USA or outside that area would be like the upper Missouri
Basin sort of plains of the Dakotas.
Yes.
Would I be right in in, in thinking that?
Yes.
And so that is an America within America.
How does one live one's life as a tribal advocate?
And maybe before we get into this, your name Tom, Tom Ha Tom ha Tom hav
Jeff Tomhave: Tom ha
Rupert Isaacson: Tom ha.
Talk to us about the origin of that name, because I suspect that in
the origin of names we can learn a lot and then we can go from there.
Jeff Tomhave: Well, I'm, I'm glad you asked that because most people assume that
Tom Hay is some kind of indigenous name.
Mm-hmm.
It's actually German.
Okay.
One quarter German and.
The German ancestors I'm sure you know this, Rupert a lot of German immigrants
moved to, you know, the great the Great Lakes area and the upper plains.
So Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota is filled with Germans and Germans.
Germans and Scandinavians.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
And, and I've been told it's because, you know, that part of the United
States looks like where they came from.
So in doing the, my own genealogy research, I found that Tom ha is actually,
you know, the, the, the shortened version.
It was originally Tom Haven.
Ah, that would make sense.
From like, from like, I don't know, like the 13 hundreds.
It was Zh at one time.
But anyway, anyway, that's, that's where that name comes from.
And throughout my life you know, teachers and, and you know, other
people have always assumed that it's it's some kind of indigenous name
and Well, I just let 'em think that.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, but I mean it, I think one could be forgiven for thinking that because
it's not an obvi, if it was Tom Haven, it one would automatically think Germanic.
Yes, it's true.
Tom Hay one does not.
And I'm, I was actually busy googling it as you were talking there, and
it, it also seems to possibly have a a Belgian, but it would be the,
the Flemish, Dutch what's the area?
Free Freezeland area.
Mm-hmm.
Name.
And then, then it actually does make sense to me.
And yeah, as you, as you say, that's, you know, rather, like me, I'm a
product of the colonial experience.
My surname Isaacson was Lithuanian Jews who wanted to sound less Jewish and
less starve in German, southwest Africa.
So they misguidedly changed their name from Mirko to Isaacson, thinking this
would make them more, more accepted.
I dunno why they didn't go for like, fun, Isaac or something like that.
But no, they went with Isaacson, which of course didn't work.
And the other side we're all, you know, Dutch and English and
Scottish and you know, yeah.
Here I am, the mishmash.
So, but you, despite the fact that the name is Germanic yes.
Are Native Americans, so, and why did you decide to get involved in tribal advocacy?
Why not just go and live your life?
And also if you're gonna become a lawyer, why not just go off and
become the kind of lawyer that.
Gets rich.
Why, why not just, you know, look after nice oil contracts in North Dakota or
something like that, and then, you know, retire to Palm Springs and play golf.
You know, like why did you choose the part you chose?
Jeff Tomhave: These are all good questions.
I'm gonna probably ask that every day.
First I wanna swing back to to you know, my own heritage.
So, so my father was, you know, he was half so he grew up on his
reservation, the Fort Reservation in North Dakota, you know, as a half breed.
And so he was never, he wasn't Indian enough for the Indian kids, and he
was, you know, not white enough for the white kids and, and all of that.
But on my mother's side, my mother's maiden name is Kit,
and that is an indigenous name.
And that actually means lake Superior in, in Potawatomi because
that's where she came from.
You know, that's where, that's where her tribe was from.
So on my mom's side, I am also Potawatomi and HoChunk which are two
tribes from was the Wisconsin area and.
Like most native people of my generation, and I am 62 years old
now, our parents probably met at some off reservation boarding school.
And so most Native Americans are this tribe and that tribe because their
parents met at boarding schools.
And so, you know, I'm a product of that.
And that gets into, you know, why, why tribal advocacy.
My father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and which if your audience is
not familiar, that is the branch of the federal government that provides most of
the services on Indian reservations that the federal government would provide.
And to give you a sort of a historical perspective getting into colonialism,
it would be like a a British, or I mean a European colony somewhere.
The governor of that colony would be the one, you know, administering
the programs for that colony.
That's essentially the BIA did.
And in, and in some part still does on different reservations
in the United States.
And so he worked for that, his entire, his entire professional career.
And ultimately, you know, made his way up the, up the organization where
they wanted him to be to run it in DC and he ac he actually refused to
do so and, and he, he turned down promotion after promotion because he
saw how you can't really do anything.
I mean, you know, you, you, you can provide services, but you can't
really help the people if, if the services aren't geared for the people.
Put it this way, if you're, if you are serving the federal government, you're
not necessarily serving the tribal people.
And that's sort of what he saw and that's what he told me.
And and honestly, that's really what I've done.
And, and because I am this tribe and this tribe and this tribe, I
sort of have a, a, a more global perspective of what tribes need.
And I originally didn't want to do this.
I actually wanted to get into, into media, into filmmaking and
was starting out doing that.
And along the way I, I had a found a mentor and this mentor told me.
He said, well, if you ever wanna have, if you ever wanna own a new car, and
if you ever wanna buy a house, find a profession, you know, get a, get a degree
and, and, and make that be what you do.
And then this can be your hobby.
And so I actually took his advice to heart.
And so, 10 years out of college, I went back to law school.
And I, I didn't wanna be a lawyer.
I never wanted to be a lawyer.
'cause God knows the world is filled with enough lawyers.
But I wanted to have the law degree because it gives you an opening that
not having it wouldn't, wouldn't give you Oh, it gives you a Yeah.
Sort of, yeah.
There's a gravitas to having a, a JD behind your name and it opens doors and
it, and it keeps conversations going.
And that's what I wanted to do, is I wanted to have my law degree so
that I could help Indian people.
I had no idea how to do that.
But other than, you know, because the United States government, the whole
founding of it is based upon property law.
Mm-hmm.
The, the Bill of Rights, which is, you know, oh yeah, let's,
let's protect the people too.
That was sort of an add-on, you know, in order to get the Constitution
passed, they said, okay, we'll throw on the bill of Rights too.
But it's basically about property law.
It's about how to keep the property with the people who own it and
how to protect that property.
That's pretty much the United States government in a nutshell.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Tomhave: And so I wanted to use that legal training for tribal people so that
they could use their own property, whether it was real property or intellectual
property for their own benefit.
And so that's really why, what I wanted to do with a law degree, not necessarily, you
know, be in a courtroom arguing, you know, esoteric matters of the law, but getting
tribal people to start thinking about how they could really exercise their own
inner power to do what they wanted to do.
And so that's, that's, that's really what I wanted the law degree for.
Rupert Isaacson: And let me ask you, Anai, even perhaps to your mind,
overly obvious question, but if you are listening to this, say in Germany or
New Zealand, it might not be obvious why Native American people might need that.
Why did you feel or still feel that Native American people
need that kind of access to.
The power to argue for their property rights?
What's missing that they don't have?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, because there are 575 federally recognized tribes in the
United States, 236 have reservations.
So a, a land base that they call their home.
However, except for a handful of cases, they don't actually own that land.
The federal government owns that land and it's held in
trust for the benefit of them.
So, for instance, Navajo Nation biggest reservation in the United States,
they don't own a, a, a bit of it.
Interesting.
They own parcels outside of it, you know, but they're like any other landowner.
They, they own that place.
They don't own their reservation.
And so the way that the, the federal laws have been designed is to disenfranchise
Indian people from pretty much everything from their land, from their culture,
from their language, from their history.
And so that's why it's important for me and, and professional
natives of my generation to get.
Indian people, especially elected leaders, to start thinking all
around the lines of, we don't need the federal government's permission
to do something, we can just do it.
Besides, they're gonna give it to us anyway, so why don't we just do it?
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
The question is, do what, what is the need?
Like if, if you were to put in a nutshell, the lack that spurred you
as a younger man to say, look, I need to try and fill this gap here.
What is that gap?
What is the major disenfranchisement?
Jeff Tomhave: The major disenfranchisement is the fact that Indian people
have been so colonized that they've forgotten how they govern themselves.
What I mean by that is most tribal nations did not have jails.
You know, you dealt with a wrongdoing by having the, the, the person who
did the wrong make things right.
So, for instance, if you killed somebody for whatever reason, you know, accident
on purpose, you were jealous, whatever, you then had the responsibility to
take care of that person's family.
For the rest of your life.
That was your sentence.
And so, so jump forward to present day.
When tribes run their own jail systems, they don't have the capacity
to do it the way it's done, say outside in the local county jail or
in the state prisons or whatever.
They don't have the personnel.
They don't have the expertise, they don't have the programming.
For instance, they don't have healthcare in, in jails, in, in tribal jails.
There is no healthcare in tribal jails.
And so rather than trying to perfect jails, why not go back to the old
way of doing things of not jailing people and make the sentence more
in line with how your worldview used to be and how it should be.
Because if you don't have the capacity to run a jail, then
you shouldn't be jailing people.
But if you do have the capacity to monitor somebody's penance
through their own atonement work, well then you could do that.
The reason that I mentioned that tribes don't own their
land, it's important because.
Because they don't own their land.
They can't impose property taxes.
And without property taxes, you can't run government services.
And so everything that tribes do, jails for instance, all depend upon
funding from the federal government.
And funding from the federal government is, it's haphazard.
It, you know, it happens every year.
Congress can fund programs for Indian tribes however they want to, and
they usually are grossly underfunded.
And that's the situation is if you don't have the capacity to enact
property tax to provide services for your people, then you gotta rethink how
you are gonna provide those services and what kind of services you provide.
For instance, why run a jail if you don't have, if you don't have
the revenue to run it properly?
And why not do something that is more in line with your own traditional
philosophy of how to deal with wrongdoing.
That
Rupert Isaacson: kind Is that, is that what you have?
Is that where you have spent a lot of your career, is in that aspect of trying to
change the relationship with wrongdoing?
And if so, how on earth do you enforce that?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, that is still an unrealized ambition of mine.
Okay.
But you asked why I wanted to get into this.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Okay.
So this is like in principle, right?
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
In principle.
In principle, yeah.
And I just use the, the, the jail analogy because everyone understands jail.
So no matter where your audience is, they all understand, you know,
what they're supposed to be and usually what they actually are.
So you could imagine in the tribal aspect, there're a lot more there're a
lot more degraded than, than elsewhere.
And I've toured tribal jails.
They're, they're actually really pretty bad.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I'm sure they are.
What, what is, what have you spent, like, talk us through the highlights
of your career in advocacy then.
What have been the things that you've worked on?
What have you seen succeed?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, most of what we've spent, or Brandy and I have
spent the last 22 years working on is infrastructure development
that most people take for granted.
For instance, you could live in any, any big city in America or any small, you
know, rural county in America and you're probably going to have electricity,
running water and a paved road outside.
Now you may not be able to afford to hook up to that electricity
or that running water, but you can walk on that paved road.
It's available to you whether you can afford it or not.
In a lot of places in Indian country, there still is not paved roads.
There's still not running water, there's still not electricity.
There are some places where there still not telephone service.
Nowadays with cell phone service, that's pretty much over.
But even 20 years ago, there were places you didn't have hardwire cell
hardwire, landline telephone service just because it was too remote and too
cost prohibitive to put it in there.
Rupert Isaacson: So I'm just gonna play devil's advocate.
'cause of course, when I was a kid growing up in the uk in the late
seventies, early eighties, even on the farms a hundred miles from London, you
didn't necessarily have electricity.
People certainly didn't necessarily own a car.
The road might not be paved, you know, and this happened somewhat slowly.
You know, there'd been World War ii.
Post-war austerity growth was slow.
The, the general prosperity that one sees now in Western Europe wasn't there.
The cities were filthy.
They were, you know, falling down.
That's changed now.
But of course, if you, and when I was a kid in I have Portuguese family,
and I remember in the countryside in Portugal, around then it was, people
would still walk, women would walk a kilometer to get water pots on the head.
And rural transport was Volkswagens.
Not in, not in the capital in Lisbon, but outside in the mountain shore.
Again, that changed.
Then of course, I remember seeing Eastern Europe went through its thing and it
went from, you know, horse agriculture to mechanized agriculture, kind of in
front of my eyes after the war came down.
So, and, and I remember even when I moved first to Texas 25 years ago or so, the
community that we went were in certainly didn't have paved roads and, you know, and
that was really just outside of Austin.
But what you have said is true because in all of those cases, as
soon as the governments could provide those services, they of course did.
As soon as those revenues were there, you know, the pa the road
outside our place in Texas did become bathed, et cetera, et cetera.
And when I was working as a journalist in, say, on the Navajo reservation, back
in the nineties, late nineties and so on.
Yeah.
The, the life that one saw was remotely rural in that way, that, that, you
know, outside of certain places, there just were no services, period.
People were self-sufficient and that was that.
And I believe in, in many cases, probably still are.
You have worked then trying to get that kind of infrastructure
to these places, I presume.
Yes.
Have you done it and have you been successful at it?
Jeff Tomhave: Yeah, we have because really when you you gotta find your champion
whether it's in a member of Congress or it's someone in a federal agency.
And once you do, and okay, this might not be how it is right now in
Washington DC under this current, but
Rupert Isaacson: who knows how it's right now in Washington,
Jeff Tomhave: in, in our history, you know, in our experience.
And, you know, we've been doing this brand and I have been doing this together
for 22 years, but we've both been doing stuff like this for the previous 10 years.
Just not with each other, not not our own company.
Our experience has been that people come to DC because they
want, they want to solve problems.
They wanna, they want to fix things, they want to, they wanna leave a legacy.
Rupert Isaacson: They wanna make things better.
Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: They wanna make things better.
And so you find that champion and you take, you know, in our case, our
community story, and we usually begin in the local community and make, make it
tell their story to that person that we eventually find as a champion.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Tomhave: And make it be their story, because they wanna be the hero, they
want to be the hero of, of whatever.
And so that's how we've been able to do it.
We've been able to say, Hey, all we need is, you know, a couple hundred
thousand dollars to do the study.
Everything with the infrastructure.
You gotta do the preliminary studies, the environmental studies, the
historical studies, everything first.
And that's usually the first phase.
And then afterwards, then you find the funding to actually do the project.
But once you've done the first step, which is the studies, the, the second
step is usually much easier because, oh, you've already done step one.
Now we just move on to step two.
And, and that's how the process used to work here in dc.
Hopefully we'll get back to that someday.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Jeff Tomhave: But yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: so, so there you are based in dc you know, originally from deep
within the American heartland, but then based in DC would a tribe then contact
you or your firm, engage your services and say Jeff, we need this health service,
we need this road, we need a better jail.
We need a thing.
Right.
Can you help us to find a congressman or woman who will advocate for
us and help us find that money to put into place this service?
Is that basically describe what you would do
Jeff Tomhave: Exactly.
That, that's exactly how,
Rupert Isaacson: okay.
Exactly.
Jeff Tomhave: How, how it works.
Rupert Isaacson: Can you give us a couple of examples of where that succeeded?
Jeff Tomhave: Sure.
The I don't know how familiar you're with, with Navajo, but it's in three states.
You know,
Rupert Isaacson: I'm, I'm quite familiar with Navajo now.
Primarily I'm coming to my own story with Navajo in a minute, but yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: Okay.
Primarily Arizona and New Mexico and a little, little part in Utah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yep.
Jeff Tomhave: The Utah section, there's a, there is a community
there called Navajo Mountain.
It's on Navajo Mountain.
Mm-hmm.
And there, it, it is in the Utah section, but the road to get to
it starts in the Arizona section.
There is no way to get to it from the Utah, from other places
in Utah on U through Utah.
The only road that goes there is in Arizona, so it's a 14 mile road.
The
students who went there were bused from all over the Utah section because in
United States school districts work by, by, you know, districts, but they're,
they're confined to their states.
And so the Utah School District represented about half of the
Utah section, the Navajo Nation.
And in order for the kids to get to that school, they had to be bused through the
Arizona section and then back up to Utah.
It was about a four hour one way drive for some, if not most of the students.
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
Jeff Tomhave: And the, the, the parents got frustrated because, you
know, obviously when it rains there and the, the roads turn into mud bogs,
the school bus can't get through.
And so kids are missing all kinds of school missing so much school,
in fact, that I believe if you miss.
Something like 16 school days in a, in a school year, you actually
have to be held back for the next year because you've missed too much.
School kids were, that was happening repeatedly.
Parents were frustrated and so they actually sued not only the the Bureau of
Indian Affairs, but the Navajo Nation and the state of Utah to say, Hey, fix this
road so that, you know, it doesn't take four hours to get there, you know, so that
kids can get there in a normal, you know, school drive, you know, an hour at most,
you know, or school bus drive an hour.
At most.
The lawsuit was actually successful.
And all three of the parties, the Navajo Nation, the state of Utah, and the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, they actually built a brand new school in Utah.
Two new schools.
In fact, the, the the primary school in the secondary school,
brand new beautiful facilities, and they paved the road all the way
from the school to the Utah border.
Problem was the Arizona side was still a dirt road, so there's 14
miles that was still a dirt road, so the problem was still in existence.
So we took that issue and took it to Navajo's.
Representative at the time and said, this is an obvious equal protection argument.
This is a constitutional issue.
These kids have a, have a constitutional right to get to school
like any other kid in any other district school district in America.
And that was the winning argument.
Our member of Congress was able to get us the money for that.
And in that time, in that process of, of getting the, the roadway
paved, what had happened was that
the local utility, the Navajo owned utility, put in new water lines
along that right of way of the road.
And they also put in new electrical and new internet lines.
And so not only did we get this 14 sec, 14 mile section of road
paved, but they got brand new infrastructure all the way because
the road was actually not being used.
And so they could do all of that maintenance work and all that,
all that construction work.
And so now, the Navajo Mountain schools are like state of the art.
They're winning awards in Utah.
They've got this robotics team that they do robotics
competitions all over the country.
And so that's sort of like one one example, another example we got a
call from a local Navajo aids patient advocacy groups saying we can't get
any treatment for HIV aids, you know, and, and, you know, our local Indian
Health Service is not being responsive, you know, do something about this.
So we actually looked into what that was, and we found out that
treatment for HIV aids, that wasn't anything that the Indian Health
Service was off, was authorized to do.
They were authorized to provide prevention and awareness and
screening, but not treatment.
And so that was a, a pretty easy one.
So when the reauthorization for the federal HIV aids treatment bill came
through, we were able to get the internet health service included in that.
And I say that as though that was easy.
It actually took us about four years to do that.
But it was a, it was a really easy fix because the local community thought their.
Their local Indian health Service was being unresponsive, not knowing
that they weren't, they weren't able to do this anyway, but we
were able to get them to do this.
And so now HIV AIDS treatment is available throughout Indian country
because we were able to do that.
Rupert Isaacson: What's interesting to me about that story is given that AIDS
was such a big thing surely you as a Native American, you know, would've been
aware that that service was lacking.
Like would've heard someone saying about something about it somewhere.
It's interesting.
And, you know, I would've assumed, okay, it's a health, you know,
there are health services.
AIDS is the thing that would be sort of on the, and of course my background's
in Africa, lots of it down there.
So, you know, it's just front and center to find out that it
wasn't, is, let's say, surprising.
What were people doing?
Were they just dying at home?
Jeff Tomhave: Or they'd go off reservation to go seek treatment?
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Okay.
So if they could afford to find some health insurance somewhere, they could go
and get it, but not on the reservation.
If they were dependent upon the local reservation service, they might die.
Jeff Tomhave: Right.
Exactly.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Wow.
Okay.
Tell us another one.
Jeff Tomhave: Well, I, I know Brandy had mentioned this one but we were able to get
the first cancer treatment center on a, on Indian Indian reservation at the Tuba
City Hospital in on the Navajo Nation.
And that was a 10 year process.
Okay.
But the finding the the oncologists and finding the
pharmacy and all the specialized equipment, that was the easy part.
The hard part was getting the federal government to reimburse the services,
which they do everywhere else across the country except for Indian country
because they weren't authorized to do so.
And so it, it was a 10 year process for us to get the federal agency that does
that, to get them authorized to do that.
Rupert Isaacson: Why were they not authorized and why would it be
difficult to get 'em to be authorized?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, because
pretty much everybody in the federal government assumes that, well, since
there is a bureau of Indian Affairs right?
And there's an Indian Health Service, they're the ones that do all that stuff.
Not knowing that they actually don't do all of that stuff.
They're very limited in what they can do.
Even more limited in, in how they're funded.
And so a lot of other federal agencies actually provide services
for Indian tribes in Indian country through other programs.
It's just that the leadership of those agencies and departments
might not necessarily ever even know that or be aware of that.
So they didn't, they didn't know that and they didn't wanna know about that.
So that's why it took us 10 years.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
And what are you working on now?
What's the current project?
Jeff Tomhave: Well right now the the hospital is it's the hospital
that where we were able to get the cancer services stood up.
They their actual building is well over 50 years old and so
they wanna get it replaced.
It's gonna be about a billion dollars.
And as I've told them, there's, there are no pot of money in Washington DC that is
a billion dollars to replace a hospital.
We're gonna have to do it in, in stages and in phases and, and, and all that.
But no, we that's the big one that I'm working on right now.
But also because of the work that we were doing with cancer.
I'm starting a an organization that is gonna try to get cancer treatment
on reservations more readily.
Now that we've been able to get the services reimbursed, now we actually
want to start providing services.
And so I'm working with the handful of, of native oncologists across the country.
And when I say handful, I mean a handful.
There was only five that we know of, of native oncologists, and
they're all willing to partner and, and get this thing going.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
You know, it's, it's very interesting when, I remember when I moved to
the USA one of my first questions was, where do I find Indians?
Where do I find Indian culture?
And I moved to California when I first moved, and so, you know, it was
San Francisco and my then partner's, you know, friendship Circle was very
liberal, very progressive, very East Bay.
Mm-hmm.
So I thought, oh, they'll know.
In the same way that if you, if you are Southern African, you, you know
where the tribes live, you know that, you know the clauses are there
in the Eastern cape, you know that.
Tu are up there in Latu.
You know that the su swazis are there In Su Swaziland, there're is zululand.
There is, you know, up in Botswana it's the Botswana, there's Shauna
and the end Bailey, that's Zimbabwe.
You, you know this.
And you, you might be unaware of some smaller tribes and know, and there also
might be not so nice colonial reasons why they are placed, where they are placed.
But you do know, I mean, you would know where to go, what you know, to, to see
and experience the indigenous culture.
What flummoxed me when I got to the USA was like, no, like not only did people not
know, but they really didn't want to know.
And so you would ask people including liberal, educated, you know, Northern
Californians and the, the resistance to it and the dismissal of the question
was almost a little bit hostile.
And it was interesting to me.
I thought, wow.
And, and, and then I would ask, well, aren't you interested?
I mean, you know, you're born here.
I mean, you're born on that mountain and surely you'd kind of want to know,
and that mountain kind of has an Indian name or the, the state has an Indian
name, or the river has an Indian name.
And aren't you kind of curious about, you know, just who the people were?
I mean, aren't you curious about the history, even if
they're not there anymore?
No.
The answer was like, no.
And I think, what, what's the difference?
Why, why were people so incurious?
Almost deliberately incurious, and it's my journalist mind.
It's like, I've gotta know this, you know?
And then I realized, oh, I see.
Because the colonial experience in southern Africa, while brutal was not that
type of genocide there were genocides that happened, but overall, there wasn't enough
overwhelming white settlement coming in.
There weren't tens of millions of people getting on ships from Europe and
going down to South Africa, there were, you know, maybe a couple of million.
So just pure economics, you're not gonna go down and wipe out the labor
force, and you couldn't, if you tried something might happen like a smallpox
epidemic or a, a particularly brutal local war those things for sure happened.
But in general, you were always gonna be outnumbered by the people who lived
there, which of course meant that sooner or later they were gonna take it back.
And that's of course what happened.
But the story in North America was so different because the sheer volume
of people coming in was greater than the number of people who were
living there in the first place.
Right.
And so there was.
No other way that it was gonna go.
And I thought, I see there must be some sort of deep-rooted guilt about
that, which makes people incurious, who even would, these would be the
sort of people who would go to an anti-apartheid rally, you know?
Or perhaps now it would be something for freedom for Palestine or something.
Yes.
But they wouldn't take up the flag for the local Indian tribe.
And, and so I, I was asking people, well, who are the local Indians here?
There must be, I mean, you know, there were people living here before.
I mean, I know San Francisco's, you know, been a Spanish settlement for a
long time, but before them, there were people here and I'm looking on the map.
Look, there's reservations.
Look, look, no, what's that tribe?
You know, it begins with m it's you know, and have you been there?
No.
Do you wanna go there?
No.
Why not?
Why are you asking these questions?
Okay, interesting.
So then, of course, I had to go and I found out about, so I, you
asked me about Navajo Nation.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Indian country and Navajo Nation.
Now, I would say that anyone who's gone and lived in America, or benefited
from America in any way, of course owes a debt of gratitude to Native
America because they created America.
And so if you have benefited from America, you have benefited from.
The fruits of those peoples.
But that's, but in a more direct way.
I began a journalistic experience in Navajo Nation that started in the late
nineties and then popped up again a couple of times where I was following
various land rights issues there.
In the same way that I was doing it in Africa and reporting on it, not for
American press, but for British press because Brits are interested in it.
By the time my son became diagnosed with severe autism and those of you, you know,
who know my story that I went to Mongolia and there was a very big healing there.
And then I was back in Africa and then I found myself in
Australia in the rainforest there.
But my, the final healing was actually on Navajo.
And it was this guy called Chi who also went by the name of Blue Horse.
And at the end of that healing where we sweated on behalf of my son my son
became like properly conversational that day, not a week afterwards.
That day.
And he did it on I 40 driving out of Navajo reservation.
He said something to me that was not what his previous scripted
autism, you know, it was, we had just come out of the last ceremony,
Jeff Tomhave: mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Sunrise ceremony with, with pollen.
And subsequently various friends of mine went to this healer for various things.
And all of them ended up with a very, very positive outcome.
And
so I have this debt.
And also professionally, I have a debt because my first break into journalism
was actually given to me by the Cree Indians when I was living up in Canada.
I reported on their land rights issue where the government, hydro company,
hydro Quebec, was going to flood.
It blew my mind an area the size of France
Jeff Tomhave: mm-hmm.
And
Rupert Isaacson: area the size of France to sell this wa hydroelectricity
to the New England states.
And the flow of the water was going to be so big that it was gonna cause
the earth's crus to shift and release all this mercury from the bedrock.
And it actually had happened before in the seventies and a smaller.
Way.
So they, the Cree had managed to get a settlement from the government
and they'd used it quite wisely.
Quite a lot of their kids had ended up going off to law school 'cause
they knew that it would happen again.
And of course when it did, they were sort of ready.
And I went and reported on that.
Again, not for the Canadian press, not for the American
press, but for the British press.
And they were successful.
And they gave me that story 'cause I went up there as a completely
poverty stricken freelance journalist.
And they flew me around on the, on the sea planes.
And they got me out to the trapping camps on the snowmobiles.
And all of this would've cost thousands.
Thousands so I could get that story out.
And so I owe so much to Native America, and I'm always intrigued by how
invisible it is when you are in the USA.
I was just in Florida, right?
I was just in Florida and I went to visit a friend who lives in a
place called Jupiter, Florida, which is just outside Palm West Farm.
And I am driving around and then I see this little blo, you know,
brown plaque about a battle.
I'm like that battle, the date, it could only have been against
Indians, it couldn't have been against the Spanish or anything.
And I remembered, oh yeah, the Seminole Wars.
I'd heard of the Seminole Wars.
Yeah.
So I get on Wikipedia, I look up and I realized I'm in the
middle of Seminole country.
And there are actually semial reservations around me, but
there is zero evidence of it.
So why is this Jeff?
Why, you know, somewhere like Navajo notion.
Okay.
In the southwest, huge areas, vast, you know, remote.
Okay.
And then when you get in there, oh yeah, okay.
Here's a big intact culture.
But we can understand that it's a schlep to get in there
'cause it's a remote place.
But when you're dealing with places like Upstate New York or California,
or Florida, it's not remote.
Jeff Tomhave: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: These people are living right there in the communities.
So why is it invisible?
Why is Native America invisible?
As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm an autism dad and we have
a whole career before this podcast in helping people with neurodivergence,
either who are professionals in the field.
Are you a therapist?
Are you a caregiver?
Are you a parent?
Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
I really didn't know what to do.
So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
Temple Grandin.
And she told me what to do.
And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
approach, it's called Movement Method.
You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
It's almost laughably simple.
The important thing is to begin.
Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
Grandin and see what results can follow.
Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
com Sign up as a gold member.
Take the online movement method course.
It's in 40 countries.
Let us know how it goes for you.
We really want to know.
We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
Jeff Tomhave: Two reasons.
I'm gonna give you the, the simple answer first is because Native
Americans are also Americans.
And so when you live in an urban area, say in Southern California or Phoenix
or Albuquerque or Miami, you're gonna, it's hard to differentiate where the
suburbs end and the reservation begins because you have the same businesses.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Tomhave: And so, so Native Americans are Americans.
They like the same fast food culture and, and big box store
culture as everyone else.
And so.
That's the easy answer.
The harder answer is because of the checkerboard system.
Now, this goes way back in US history.
Basically to get the railroads built, the federal government promised the
railroads, Hey, every 10 miles we're gonna give you, you know, a 10 mile
stretch and it can go for another 20 miles so that you can build your towns.
And, you know, obviously, 'cause it was steam engines, they, they needed
every, every 10 miles or so, they needed to get water for their engines.
And so you could build that infrastructure there and put towns in and you,
you could sell all that, lease, all that property to pay for all this.
We'll give that to you.
Well, where did those, where did that land come from?
It came from reservations.
It, it, the reservations that were negotiated, that's
where that land came from.
And so part of part of it was building the railroads, took a lot of Indian land
and then the allotment act, which when public lands were open to homesteaders,
they said, Hey, come and get all your, you know, your, your 40 acres and, and
you know, you can prosper and, and.
You'll succeed.
And so that's where a lot of a lot of reservations became
diminished because of that.
And so
I know that you've experienced this because I've, I've heard you
speak about this where you're on a reservation and you don't know
you're necessarily on a reservation.
That's also because of right of way, if you're driving on a highway that is
not the reservation, that's the right of way or of the state or the county.
And so all of the billboards, all of the gas stations, basically everything
in that right of way is gonna look as though it's any road, any place else.
And it isn't until you get off of those roads and go a couple of miles into this,
to the communities that you'll actually find the Indian settlements, the, the
people you know, and, and, and that,
but I also think that what you touched on earlier is also true.
There's a lot of white guilt in Americans they don't wanna know,
and so they don't want to see it.
And so they're, they're, they're more than happy to go buy tax-free cigarettes
and tax-free gasolines on reservations.
But that's the extent of it.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
I've got a challenging question.
So Colonialization is a two-edged sword.
You know, have you ever seen Monty Python's life of Brian?
You know, of course.
And there's, there's the scene where it's the liberation front, you know,
the ju the Judean Liberation front.
What are the Romans ever done for us?
Hey, hey, you know, so well
Jeff Tomhave: roads
Rupert Isaacson: aqueduct, apart from Aqueduct, what are they?
Well, roads well apart from Rhodes, what are they?
And then they go through the, well, apart from roads, aqueduct healthcare,
you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, what have they ever done for us?
And it's poignant because you said, you know, Amer native Americans are Americans,
they like box store culture, they like fast food culture, et cetera, et cetera.
And I'm curious about that because that is of course the hand of colonialism.
If you like destroying culture and I'm, you and I both know that there are many,
many enclaves of Native America within all over North America, where actually
the original culture is very, very strong.
To the point that, like I've been on the valley floor of Canyon Deha in Navajo
country where it's like a traditional life from about a hundred years ago.
But, and people living down there to some degree choose that, but by, that's
by no means, you know, everywhere.
Why do you, and, and then I remember when we met at the Quis
Film Festival in Montana last year.
And I remember there was a movie about the Blackfoot Nation and their relationship
with horses and the land and so on.
But as an outsider, I have to say it looked like just other normal
American sort of semi ranch type people living in trailers, dressing like
white people driving the same truck.
You basically adopting the same culture the same.
And there was a lot of talk about the culture in that movie, and then you saw
like little snippets of it, but mostly what you actually observed as an outsider.
It's like, no, look dude, it looks exactly the same as anywhere
else in White Western America.
What's the difference?
Jeff Tomhave: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Naive question.
So my question is in a, in a state of being where one is fighting
for advocacy, self-advocacy,
why the wholesaler adoption of the colonial culture?
Jeff Tomhave: Because the traditional culture has been taken away.
And so a lot of people don't necessarily know it's not their experience.
They don't know what their traditional culture is.
Okay.
And they're, they're like anyone else.
They're searching, they're, they're looking at things, you know?
And in order for culture to survive, it has to adapt.
And so,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: I am gonna tell you a story and hopefully this'll,
this'll illustrate what I mean.
So, you know, Brandy, she's chota one of the five civilized tribes, and they're
called civilized tribes because they were
Rupert Isaacson: Brandy, by the way.
Is, is, is, is Jeff's wife who runs a Native American Humane Society.
Yes.
Please go and check her interview out on Equine Assisted World.
My other podcast.
'cause it's, it's really a great interview, but just when he says
Brandy, that's what he means.
Okay.
Sorry.
Yes.
Okay.
Jeff Tomhave: So yes, so, so, should member of Choctaw Nation they're
part of the five civilized tribes.
They're called the civilized tribes because early on they adopted
English, they adopted Christianity, they wrote their own constitutions.
And like the rest of America, they had African slaves.
And so they're called the five civilized tribes.
Right.
Speak English.
Right.
Became Christians really early in their history,
Rupert Isaacson: settled in towns.
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
Settled in towns, had newspapers.
It looked
Rupert Isaacson: like colonial towns.
Jeff Tomhave: Yeah.
Had constitutions, had to, had sheriffs and, and all that stuff.
Right.
And a couple of years ago we were driving through Oklahoma and
we went to Durant, which is the capital of the Choctaw Nation.
They had just opened their cultural center.
It actually had opened just as COVID hit.
So when they opened, they actually didn't open.
And so we were there, you know, a few years afterwards when, you know it was
safe to come out again and they were actually having their big opening.
And so we were there.
And when we got there, there was a Navajo woman who was the, the, the person,
the hostess who, who introduced us.
'cause she married a Choctaw guy.
And she said, oh, here's, here's our programming here.
Here's what you, you know, here's what you might wanna do today.
And one of 'em was Choctaw language classes.
And so, you know, brand new perked up immediately.
And we went into 'em and they were singing hymns.
And it finally dawned on me they became Christians so that they could hide
their culture right out in the open.
They were singing hymns in Choctaw.
And it dawned on me right then and there.
Ah, okay, now I get it.
So, the Choctaw Nation has probably
per capita some of the, the, the, the highest fluent speakers of anywhere.
They are the, I believe they're the, the second largest tribe.
Navajos being the first, and I know Navajos has a pretty big fluent
speaker numbers, but I believe Chota is just right behind them.
And it's not that they, they don't like say, oh, English is bad.
No.
It's that they've been able to keep their culture because they, they adapted this
persona of being just like white people.
And so they were able to shield it for themselves.
And I think that that's, that's that is more prevalent than not.
Now you said, you know, you, you, you've been to enclaves
where there's thriving cultures.
I've been to places where there are what are called unacknowledged
tribes you know, federally recognized tribes, meaning, you know, you have a
relationship with the federal government.
You know, it's, it's based on a treaty or a statute or something, but there's
some federal reason why the United States government deals with you as a
tribe, as a separate political entity.
And that's, that's called federal recognition.
There are what are called unacknowledged tribes in that
they never had that interaction.
So they're just these small rural communities off in the
mountains or wherever, you know, the desert floor, wherever.
And they haven't ever had that experience.
So they're completely intact.
They've got their language, they've got their culture,
they've got their, their religion.
And even though they speak English and they go to schools and all that,
they still have all of that, because that was never taken from them.
And I've been there, I've seen it.
It, it, it exists.
And, and so I think there's, there's,
there's the extreme way of, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna adapt everything
that, that white American culture has, and we're gonna take it on as our own
and hide our own truth inside that.
Or, Hey, you never bothered to deal with us, therefore you
never took anything from us.
And I think most tribal people, they're definitely somewhere in
between either end of that which is why, which is why, you know, the film
on the Blackfeet reservation Yeah.
They look like ranching people because they've always been ranching people.
Even before horses.
They were, they were doing animal husbandry with the wildlife, you know?
Mm-hmm.
This past summer we are in, we were in North Dakota, we went to
a powwow, and we were both amazed.
There's this brand new powwow dance that it's women and they're rodeo women,
and they dance with, with the lariats.
And the whole thing is to keep the lariat going up while they're dancing.
Rupert Isaacson: That's like Gangnam style.
Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: Yes, exactly.
And it's, it's amazing.
It's incredible because Indian people do rodeo a lot.
I mean, you'd think, oh, that's a cowboy thing.
And you know, Indian people have been doing that you know, basically forever.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, at least since the colonial experience.
I, I, I dunno if Indians were doing rodeos before,
Jeff Tomhave: well, not rodeos,
Rupert Isaacson: rodeo itself is a Spanish word, right.
I mean it
Jeff Tomhave: Yeah.
But, but animal husbandry
Rupert Isaacson: works.
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
I guess, I guess, you know, I'm, I'm only asking these questions as
devil's advocate because I think it, it's important for people to try
and who are not familiar to kind of understand where Native America's at.
And it's confusing because you can, you can meet, as you say, you
can meet a tribal person and they come across to a large extent,
just like any other American.
And then you're like, well, then where's the lack?
Why, why are you guys so poor?
You don't look poor.
You're wearing a nice thing.
You're driving a nice car.
There you are, you're living in Washington, dc you've got a, you know,
you're a lawyer, you've got a job.
Yeah.
Where's the problem?
And just as people from outside of America.
Don't see white American poverty, which for sure exists.
I've lived in rural Texas and you know, the rural south and or, you know,
people might on the other hand have a perception and say, black America and
think, well, black America's all ghetto.
And it's like, well, some of it is, but no, a lot of it isn't actually.
There's a lot of people who do very well and you know, blah, blah,
blah, and all points in between.
But I think because the Native American experience is so poignant, obviously
the Black American experiences as well, but the Native American experience of
dispossession, first of land, then of culture, as you said, you know, and
then after the conquests even after the reservations then being put into these
schools where you weren't allowed to speak your language and that, you know,
and when you were saying, oh, well people are searching for their culture, someone
listening to this might say, well, why?
I mean, it, it seems that the culture's everywhere from what you guys are saying.
There's 500 and something tribes, and there's this and there's that.
But as you begin to recount the story, you go, oh, I see.
Unless you were one of those, if you like uncontacted type tribes or happen to be,
you know, cocooned by the geographical isolation of the middle of the.
A Navajo reservation, which is the size of Ireland, you know, or
something like that, then yeah, yeah.
You know, you, you might well have actually found yourself in a
cultural no man's land as a sort of alien within your own place.
And I could see that leading to a kind of despair that, of course you see when
you meet Native American homeless people in cities and all the substance abuse
and all the, you know, the stuff that you see and then inherited trauma, we
now know much more about epigenetics, you know, when one goes up into places
like the Pine Ridge Reservation or the Rosebud Reservation than the Lakota
tribes up there where you think, well, why would they be so f you know, effed up?
Because they're the ones who came out with their, you know, spirit
intact, their military spirit.
They, you know, they beat Custer, they won all these battles, red Cloud
and, you know, sitting Bull and all these people, and they, they're, you
know, national heroes even outside of a, you know, bazillion movies.
Why then are these the poorest and most effed up places in America?
Well, yeah, they, they won those battles, so therefore the, the
government was going to go in and make sure they didn't win anymore.
And yeah.
Which, which is interesting because in Zulu land in South Africa where
my grandfather came from the Zulus.
Beat the British Army Fair and Square, huge battle battle of Tijuana.
They wiped out two British regiments had to climb over their own
dead to do it, but they did it.
And because of that, weirdly came out of the colonial experience with
a real sense of pride and therefore, weirdly less animosity towards whites.
But they didn't have the overwhelming immigration.
They were still, of course, massively abused and under apartheid and so on,
but it, it wasn't, I guess they just weren't so outnumbered and overwhelmed.
So when you talk about,
when one encounters people's attitudes towards Native America, there's
often a, an assumption, particularly within white America, that the Amer,
that the Native Americans actually do have money and they're just kind
of lazy and have no work ethic.
And you hear this a lot, like you hear, well, you know, they don't
have to pay taxes, and they've got all this and they've got all that,
and they have these casinos, and the casinos make, you know, billions.
So where's all that money going, eh?
And why should we, American taxpayers have to pay for these guys who don't
pay taxes, who have all this money coming from, say perhaps oil and gas
or perhaps from, casinos, et cetera.
And I think a lot of those people are asking those questions in good faith
because they themselves don't know, again, because of this invisibility issue.
So can you answer that?
Why are American reservations in Indian reservations so poor
when huge natural resources, when gambling, et cetera, et cetera?
Why?
What, what's, what's the disconnect?
What's going on?
What's happening?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, the short answer is that money doesn't
stay on the reservations.
Obviously with the resource extractions, it's the companies that are doing it,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
Jeff Tomhave: The tribe's getting a small royalty.
I mean, there's been, you know, it's documented.
There's court cases, you know, been going on for decades, if not, you know, a
century now of how mismanaged the federal government is with with tribal resources.
And that they don't even get market rates for them.
They get, you know, less than that.
And so, so that's sort of like the easy one.
The other one is with gaming.
You know, most people assume that it's the tribe that is, you know, running this
and therefore getting all the profits.
Well, most of these casinos, they're financed by outsiders.
You know, some of them.
The it's one of the tribes in Connecticut.
I don't remember if it's the PWAs or, or, or the Ashing Tucket, but
I believe the Sultan of Bruna is the one who put up money for that.
And of course, you know, it's a long term, you know, like 30 year loan, and so
the profits go to pay back the debt, you know, and part of the federal law that
regulates gaming on Indian reservations it was actually crafted by the State
Governor's Association so that they would get the lion's share of any profit.
So that is why, if you are aware of this there are a handful of really,
really profitable tribal gaming enterprises across the country.
And they give money to, you know, the local volunteer fire
department to build, you know, new stations, get new fire trucks.
They, they put up the new little league ball fields, you know, new auditoriums
for the local high school, all that stuff.
That's because that's part of the federal law that.
Regulates Indian gaming is a portion of any profits goes to
the local adjacent community.
And then there, and then, yes.
And then eventually some of it does come down to the tribe providing for itself.
And there are some there are some tribes where they're making
obscene amounts of money and their individual members are getting tens
of thousands of dollars a month.
And there, there is that, that, oh, well they don't work.
They're lazy.
Well, they don't have to work.
I mean, if I was getting $30,000 a month, I wouldn't work.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: But I'm not,
Rupert Isaacson: but, but what, why are some, why are some gaming
enterprises then able to pay tribal members 30,000 a month and others not
Jeff Tomhave: because they are a bus ride from New York, or they're in,
they're in suburban southern California.
They're where people are who wanna gamble and most Indian tribes are not.
And so, you know, they're, they're most Indian tribal casinos are on some, you
know, not even a, a interstate highway.
They're on some US highway.
Out in the middle of, you know, ranch land where Yeah.
If you're lucky, there's, you know, there's 50 people
there that night, you know?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: So they're not, they're not where people are.
That's, and that's why some of them aren't very successful
Rupert Isaacson: if there, if there are a handful though,
that are really successful.
Jeff Tomhave: Yes, there are.
Rupert Isaacson: Are you able, in your advocacy work, let's say you want to
pave that road in Utah, or you want to build that new hospital for the cancer
center, can you go to those other tribes?
Is there, is there that kind of solidarity in Native America, or is there not,
would, would a tribe, would the PWAs say, that's not our, that's not our concern.
Would they say?
No, that's definitely our concern
Jeff Tomhave: there.
It, it, it's a case by case basis.
Mm-hmm.
Most of them have philanthropic foundations, but they are, like any
philanthropic foundation, they're, they're basically concentrating on,
you know, their geographic area.
So, you know, so you couldn't go to somebody in Connecticut for a project
in, say, Arizona, you know, you could go to the Arizona tribes and say,
Hey, can you do this thing in Arizona?
And you know, if it, if it aligns with what their, you
know, what their principles are, then sure, you could ask them.
But it's, it's like anything else, you, you need to have that relationship
already established with them.
Mm-hmm.
That takes the time.
It takes time to cultivate and but yeah, so to answer your question, no, there
isn't that general overall solidarity.
But there, but you can find connection points if there philanthropic
guidelines align with your, with, with what you're asking for.
Rupert Isaacson: So the question again, as an outsider is why
isn't there that solidarity?
So if, if all Native Americans have had this same basic experience of
genocide, colonialization, you know, just having a really, really awful time
at the hands of European colonials, that's a common experience that
presumably binds people together.
And as you say, being thrown into schools where there's different tribes and and
so on, and so, and so people are marrying across the tribes and, and so on.
So why, what prevents that solidarity?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, I think it's it's a it's a legacy of, you know, the whole
divide and conquer, you know, practice.
You know, the federal government, it deals with tribes across the
country based upon which, which.
Federally administered region that they are in.
And so you'll have those tribes all get together and, you know, meet and discuss
about their things the others, their own.
And so there's never really a, a,
a time or a place for tribes ever just to get together on their own.
There are a few national tribal organizations but they're actually funded
primarily by the federal governments that by the federal government
agencies that these organizations are supposed to provide oversight to.
But when, but when you're being funded by them, you don't really police them.
And so that's really what happens.
So I think there really hasn't, there, there really isn't
that that avenue to do that.
And hopefully that, that's, that's, that's kind of what I'm
been trying to do is, is get.
Elected tribal people or just tribal people in general to start thinking,
Hey, just because the federal government told us we have to do it this way
doesn't mean we have to do it this way.
Rupert Isaacson: Right?
I mean, there must have been people who had this vision.
I mean, you would think, where is the Native American Martin
Luther King that there has there?
No, never been anyone who said, I have a dream.
You know?
And and also effectively, you know, listen, lads, these guys
are always gonna do us up the backside unless we get together.
And I can see how the legacy, it's not just divide and conquer,
it was also divided before white people showed up, right?
People have been at war with each other, nations have been at war with each other
in Native America before, long before any, any anyone from Europe ever showed up.
And I could see, of course that doesn't go away.
The old rivalries exist in Europe.
Why wouldn't they exist everywhere else in the world?
But nonetheless, when you are getting, when you're really
get, you are all getting it from the, the man in the same way.
You would think at a certain point people would go all in the 500 year, 600 year
history, you know, someone would go, alright, look, it's pretty clear that
unless we present some sort of united front here, nothing's gonna change.
Do you think that can happen?
Will happen, will ever happen?
And if so,
Jeff Tomhave: I am, I'm, I'm optimistic that it can happen.
I'm dubious that it will happen because people are people, people, you know, have
their old animosities and Yeah, there is, there's definitely tribal animosities,
which will prevent that from happening across certain, you know, certain divides.
And that goes way back.
That's all pre-contact.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: Animosities and warfare, and those probably will never be resolved.
But people are, people and, and people, you know, have their
own agendas and you are right.
There is no Native American Martin Luther King.
There hasn't been for hundreds of years.
You know, and the last ones were, you know, military leaders who tried to,
you know, create these tribal alliances.
And some cases did, and some cases were not successful.
But there hasn't been any in contemporary times.
And it's a, it's a shame, but I also think that because the native
population is so small mm-hmm.
That.
That
the, you know, most tribes are just a collection of, you know,
a handful of families and, you know, this family is in power once
they're in the elected positions.
And then that family gets power once they get an election.
And so there's, there's those familial intertribal squabbles that
will prevent that from happening.
But I do think that because the population is so small that, that
the vision for unity
that conversation almost never happens because
someone will say, oh, well, you know, we can't do this because of X, Y, or Z.
And the other person will say, oh, and I wouldn't wanna do it with
you because of this there or that.
So, I think if the population was larger, that would be an easier
conversation because those voices would just sort of be background noise.
But right now they're prominent.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
It's, it's interesting to me you would have thought that the same
issue would have pervaded in, in black America, because again, to the
outsiders, oh, black America's a thing.
But of course, black America's.
Many, many, many cultures not all of whom were on good terms with each
other, and yet they did manage to forge a movement that fundamentally
shifted the political landscape.
I'm optimistic.
You know, I think, I think people can change.
Like if you, it's really interesting if you look at say Scandinavia, right?
We all look at Scandinavia as like, you know, Canada's the
Scandinavia of North America.
North America is the Canada, you know, it's, you know, yeah.
They're, they're the Canada of Europe and, you know, enlightened liberal
people who very have great, you know, policies of social this and social
that, and look after their environment and was not always, so there was, there
were these people called Vikings who committed all sorts of atrocities.
And you could even argue that the Northern European colonial experience was just
a continuation of the Viking tradition.
Yet the, somewhere along the line.
They stopped doing that and became transformed into a very different society,
Mongolia, when I was in Mongolia, this was really interesting, you know, the,
the most brutal and violent culture on the planet, you know, exploding
out of Mongolian, like we killed everybody, you know, kill everybody
from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, you know, once every 50 years.
And then, whoa, that was a bit tiring, wasn't it, lads?
You know?
And so then they end up, you know, going back to the heartland and sort of
recovering for a, a generation or so.
Then they get everybody again.
And you know, you got Genghis Kahan and Khan and Tamerlan and all these people,
you know, and then somewhere in the 17th century you get these Tibetan monks
wandering over the Altai plateau and talking about this thing called Buddhism.
And like in one generation, the Mongolians go, yeah, you know,
that's a good idea actually.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe we, yeah, maybe we should do that.
Or the Berlin War coming down or the end of apartheid or whatever.
So I, I just wonder,
do you think that maturation process is round the corner
somehow for Native America?
Because it seems that as long as I've been involved in North America
that those, the, the problems despite growing prosperity generally have
remained really acute in Native America.
The, the social problems, the.
The poverty, the, as you said, all the things that you outlined, despite
as, yes, as you say, some, some people of course, do very well, but
we know that that's not the norm.
Sooner or later there kind of has to be a collective pinching of the
skin and kind of going, all right, listen, we, we, we gotta do it
differently because we're still here.
Right?
I mean, that is an achievement, as you say, it's a very small
population, but that is actually a testament to an achievement, because
by rights you shouldn't exist.
You know?
I mean, if you think about the effort that went into annihilation
of native community, you know, one just has to start reading the
histories and it's, it's criminal.
Jeff Tomhave: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: But it was also, it was final solution type criminal.
It was very well thought out, mass death on an industrial scale.
And just as Hitler couldn't kill all the Jews, though, he
gave it good old college try.
They couldn't obviously complete the genocides to the Native Americans,
but they jolly well had a go.
And, you know, I, I lived in Texas, you know.
That's Comanche country, right?
I lived in the middle of Comanche, not one Comanche, you know, within
a hundred, 200, 300, 400, 500 miles.
They, they got rid of them like really efficiently, but yet there's
still some sitting up there in a Oklahoma where they shoved them.
They're still there.
You guys are still there.
And there you've got people like you sitting in Washington,
DC you know, advocates.
You must have this dream somewhere in you.
Jeff Tomhave: Oh, of course I do.
Yeah, it's something that I've, I've wanted and thought about and contemplated
and that's, and that's why when I started I said, you know, native professionals
of my generation, because it is something that people do talk about.
It's like, when are we gonna get over these, these petty squabbles
and actually get into the game and, you know, do something about this?
And so yeah, it, it is something that, that that I, I dream about.
But I'm not sure how it's actually going to happen.
Because as long as the federal government basically controls pretty much every
aspect of tribal governments, and it does, that's not a conversation that's gonna
happen at the tribal governmental level.
It may happen elsewhere.
And that's, that's where my optimism comes from, is it may happen
at the community level, it may happen at the, the grandma level.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: It's gotta happen somewhere.
Because I think the, the, it's too easy to distract a tribal
government by doing something else.
It's like throwing a, throwing a ball at a dog, you know, the dog's gonna go
chase it, you know, rather than stay where they are, stay at the attention
and, and do what needs to be done.
So I think that that conversation, as far as I know, it hasn't happened
yet, but it could happen just not in the arena of, of tribal government.
Rupert Isaacson: I, I agree with you.
I think that I think that I mean, let's face it, Martin Luther King didn't
happen at the federal government level.
And we also know what happened to him.
But
how, let's dream a little bit, okay.
Let's say it happens at the community level.
Let's say it happens at the grandma level.
What happens fantasy scenario, what happens and how does it play out?
And what does America then look like 50 years after that happens?
As you may know, if you've been following my work, we are also horsey folk here.
And we have been training horses for many, many years in the manner of
the old classical dressage masters.
This is something which is often very confusing for people.
We shine a light on that murky, difficult stuff and make it crystal clear.
If you'd like to learn to train your horse in the manner of the old masters and
really have fun and joy for you and your equine, go to our website, heliosharmony.
com Sign up as a premium member.
and begin to take the Helios Harmony course, which will take you from zero
to the Piaf, where the horse is dancing on the spot in hand on the ground.
And then from there, you can develop out to anywhere you want to.
Heliosharmony.
com to unlock the secrets of the old masters.
Jeff Tomhave: Well, I think it first starts off with
with everybody airing their grievances, whatever they are, get them out in the
open and done with because there is so much trauma that I, I, you can physically
see people carrying this trauma with them.
They're, they're hunched over.
It's, it's, it's in them.
Yeah.
You can see the pain in them.
And I think once you start to let it out, I think it'll, it'll happen.
And I think once people aren't overburdened with whatever the
trauma is, whether it's immediate trauma from something they've
experienced, or it's this historic trauma, you know, it's still there.
It exists, it's real.
And there isn't a way to, I think deal with it in a healthy manner.
There are now Indian Health Service programs to deal with people's
historic trauma, put it that way.
Rupert Isaacson: Ah,
Jeff Tomhave: you can't go to a local clinic and, and, and,
you know, get that service.
It doesn't exist.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Jeff Tomhave: But once people have done that and, and, and they sort of relieve
themselves, or at least, you know.
Released some of that anguish and, and pain, you can start
talking about, oh, okay.
We can start dreaming, we can start thinking about possibility.
We can start doing things differently.
You know, perhaps we should stop disenrolling our members.
I mean, that would be a great idea.
Rupert Isaacson: Tell me about that.
I wouldn't even know what that means.
Jeff Tomhave: Because tribes have been successful with gaming some
tribes have just started disenrolling their members because they, they
don't wanna share the profits.
They want to keep 'em all to themselves.
And so there's a, it's a, it's a thing that's been going on for,
you know, the past 20 years now.
Tribes will just disenroll people.
Rupert Isaacson: How does one, how does one get away with that?
I mean, if you're born into that tribe, you're, that's like
disen, that's like denying your ci stripping of your citizenship.
How, how can that happen?
How does that happen?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, you, the current tribal government will say we no longer
recognize these families as being, you know, legitimately members of our tribe.
And they'll point to something, some historic, you know, thing about that
family, that family line to say, that's why they're not a member of the tribe.
And because it's the tribal government, they can do it.
And the federal government says, oh, it's an internal tribal matter.
We, we can't do anything about this.
And so you've got this phenomenon now where, where tribes are disenrolling
their members in the short term.
What that does is that increases their, their own percentage of whatever, you
know, gaming profits there are, but it also decreases their tribal members.
And federal services are based upon how many members of the tribe you have.
And eventually one of one of the consequences of a, of a federal law
that's about a hundred years old now, it's called the Blood quantum.
You know, only members of your tribe that have this amount of Indian blood in them
are considered members of your tribe.
Once they, you know, once they fall below that amount, they're
no longer members of your tribe.
They're no longer Indians.
And so.
The genocide, it still is going on, is just a paper legislative genocide.
Now, whether the federal government does it through blood quantum or
whether tribes themselves do it through disenrollment, it's happening.
So basically the ultimate result of genocide is when you get people
to kill them, kill themselves, which is what is happening now.
And so if tribes can stop disenrolling people, that will be a big step
into realizing a, a better future.
Rupert Isaacson: Do you think, are you any part of trying to get that to happen?
I mean, and is there some, is there an appeal process?
And could you go and say, and get a DNA test and say, actually look, I am, you
know, totally a member of this tribe because look, here's the DNA test.
What are, yeah, what recourse would somebo do people have if, if that,
and is it arbitrary and sudden?
Does someone just like get a letter through the mailbox saying, sorry,
you're not a member of the tribe anymore.
And it like, yeah.
So how does it happen?
Is there an appeal process?
What about DNA tests and how would people stop?
How would you stop this process inside the genocide?
Interesting.
Jeff Tomhave: Yeah.
Well, there is no appeal process as, as I mentioned before, if a, if a
currently, you know, legitimate tribal government decides they wanna disenroll,
you know, so many people they can do it.
Right?
And, and the federal government who's supposed to have oversight
always says, this is an internal matter we're not gonna deal with.
It's an internal tribal matter.
We have no say over this.
And of course, they like that because the less, the less tribal people they have
to deal with, the easier their job is.
Yeah.
So there's no appeal process.
As far as I know, there's no, you know, movement to try to rectify this.
There is no, you know, DNA fight to, to, to, because there
Rupert Isaacson: ought to be right.
If there's a blood quantum, there ought to be a DNA answer to that, right?
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
There, there should be.
Well, and the thing too is, is, as I've been saying all along, is, you know,
this federal law that says there's blood quantum tribes don't have to follow that.
They can say, no, this is, this is what we consider to be a tribal member.
Okay?
And it could be somebody who's been a historic member of a tribe.
I mean, historically you didn't even have to be Indian to
become a member of a tribe.
A tribe could just adopt you in, and then now you're a member of the tribe.
I mean, it could get back to.
That at some point.
And I think for a lot of tribes where they're dwindling down to, you
know, just a couple of dozen members, they need to do something like that.
Otherwise, they're not gonna be a tribe anymore.
They're not gonna exist.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
That, that would, yeah, that would seem to be logical.
So it, it, you know, it's just, it is intriguing to me because let's say
somebody is gonna get stripped of their citizenship for whatever reason, which is
like one of the most extreme things that can happen, and it almost never happens.
There would be all kinds of legal challenges that could and would be made,
you know, if someone was to try and take away your American citizenship or
your British citizenship or whatever.
It's, it's so extreme.
If it happens, you've gotta be a member of a terrorist organization
or something, or something.
Jeff Tomhave: Yep.
Rupert Isaacson: So I'm, I'm a little bit stunned to know that
there's no appeal process and that there'd be no DNA answer to it.
But equally, as you say why not adopt people in?
And then why not be very wise about who you adopt?
Like why not adopt Warren Buffet?
You know, why not adopt Jeff Bezos, you know, and say, alright, now
you are, you are, you are a homie.
So, you know, let's, let's see.
Some of that money to.
Build a hospital or two please.
You know, which clearly they've got that money.
Is that, is, is it something like that actually, is it something
about no, no longer trying to protect culture and hold it apart?
And coming back to my question about why would Native Americans adopt so eagerly
white culture, but actually could there be a wisdom in that integration in order
to sort of do a more successful version of what the Choctaws did to say, okay,
well then, then let's swell our numbers and then let's decide, okay, if your
family has been in America at all for some gender, or even if you've just got
off the boat and we like you, maybe, you know, all, all new new American citizens.
Like when I got my American citizenship, what if, what if 32 tribes had
come to me and said, sort of made a little presentation to me and said,
which one of us would you like to, you know, we'd love to have you.
Of course if we have you, you know, we'd like you to.
Rather like a church, we'd like you to pay a tithe and, you know,
that would go towards, you know, some of the things that we did.
But, you know, here, here are the benefits of being a member of,
of, of this tribe or that tribe.
It's very interesting, isn't it, that that isn't the way of thinking.
Do, do you think something like that could happen?
Jeff Tomhave: I I think it's possible.
I don't think it's realistic.
I don't think tribes would want to do it, but I definitely see
the benefit of how you could
increase your political reach if you had people who had different skill
sets and different economic levels.
Yeah, I, I de, I definitely see that.
You know, and that's, you know, again, I go back to that's
something that tribes used to do.
You know, you used to adopt people, you know, the, you know, in my part
of the country in North Dakota, you know, the first people that we, the
first Europeans we met were the French, you know, and, you know, we adopted
French people into our tribe, you know?
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, the Hadza knew French before they knew English, you know.
So it's, it, it's not out of the realm of possibility.
But I do like your idea of, of Warren Buffet.
That's a, that's,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
I mean, why not?
You know?
Jeff Tomhave: But, you know,
Rupert Isaacson: is every, is every American president an honorary
member of a tribe, for example?
They should be, shouldn't they?
Jeff Tomhave: It should be.
Exactly.
I think I think tribal people would probably be more comfortable with
somebody like Mark ruffle because, you know, he's out there, you know, on on
the front lines, you know, whenever there is a, whenever there's an issue.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, sure.
But
Jeff Tomhave: having the Hulk would be, would be a, a big catch.
But I, I don't know.
You know, but seriously, I think that there are a lot of people who don't
know that they do have native heritage.
You know, it might be family lore, it might be suspected, and
of course now with DNA, you know, you can be more certain of that.
Mm-hmm.
But I mean, I think to start the conversation, it would
have to be something along, you know, that kind of mm-hmm.
Scientifically, you know, sort of genetically there's gotta
be a more than just, oh, you wanna be a member of a tribe?
There's gotta be something there.
I definitely like the idea of.
What can you bring?
Not tribes going to a new citizen and saying, Hey, here's what we can offer you.
But people coming to the tribes saying, here's what you can, you know,
here's what you can offer the tribe.
Here's my skillset, here's my, here's my reach.
You know, here's, here's everybody that I know who, who can, who will
go to their member of Congress and do this thing for you.
You know?
Mm.
I
Rupert Isaacson: I think, yeah.
I wonder if the tribes can have like a golden visa type thing.
It's like, yeah, you can come in and you can, you know, live here and you
can have a nice house and you can do all this and but you know, it's
gonna cost you 500 grand and you know, you need to build that hospital.
But it seems to me though that yeah, 'cause what we're dealing
with the i is the idea of nations.
Some people say tribes, some people say nation, right?
Yes.
And nations can nation build or they can decline and, and die or, or
become absorbed into other nations.
And we know that's the process of history.
It just is intriguing that despite all attempts to extinguish it,
native America is still there.
And as you say, so many people who have lived for more than a
couple of generations in North America do have ma native blood.
And perhaps that is something that might bring.
Things to a, a, a better person.
You yourself.
Now, are you, you've, you've lived a long time in DC doing this advocacy work, so
you can obviously work and you and your wife are now moving back to the Dakotas.
I mean, that's why you're sitting in that empty room.
I happen to know 'cause you're moving house.
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: You've gone, you've bought this old school on the is it
the Mandan and reservation standing?
Jeff Tomhave: No, we're, we're in we're in Eastern North Dakota.
We're about four hours from my reservation.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Jeff Tomhave: An hour west of Fargo.
Rupert Isaacson: So you yourself are deciding to go back to Native America?
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Why?
And what are you gonna do there?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, as you mentioned, we bought this old school and
we're gonna turn it into our house.
But also it's gonna be, you know, where our businesses are located.
So Tom Hay Group will be there, and Brandy is executive director
of Native American Humane Society.
That will be centered there.
This new cancer treatment network that I'm creating that will be centered there.
So not only it's gonna be our residents and the center of our businesses, but
because it is an old school, we intend on keeping one of the classrooms as an
old classroom, I mean as a classroom, so that we can invite, different tribal
governments, different tribal entities and organizations there so that we
can conduct trainings, they can have their own trainings and meetings there.
Since we will be, you know, in North Dakota, you know, we are, we are just
a couple of days drive from about half the reservations in the country.
And so that is really important to us.
Plus you know, when we made this purchase and I told my cousin who runs the hospital
on, on my reservation, said, Hey, I'm gonna be four hours away from you.
She said, great.
She said, because, you know, other than her immediate family, you
know, all of her extended family have left and she is so great.
So you can come back for, you know, all of the birthdays and holidays, but especially
the, the tribal ceremonies, which, because I've never lived there, I've
never been able to participate in 'em.
I've always lived, you know, a few times zones away.
So it's never anything that was ever in, you know, my, my thinking.
But now that she's thinking yeah, you can come for the tribal ceremonies, you know,
to these you know, sacred ceremonies, which I've never been a part of.
You know, that's really that's really something that I'm looking forward to.
Mm-hmm.
Especially since, you know, I'm getting older and, you know,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: We're, you know, none of us are gonna last forever, so I, I actually
want to be able to, pass this stuff on to our son so that he knows it, you
know, well before he's in his sixties.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, like I said, you know, further back in this conversation, I myself just
personally owe several debts of gratitude.
I talk, I, you know, to Native American ceremony.
I told you about the one with my son.
Previous to that also on Navajo Nation.
I attended a, a sweat that was for the Bushman because I brought the
Sun Bushman to the Navajo Nation as part of our attempts to help
them get their legal title to their ancestral land back in, in Botswana.
And it was indeed successful.
The medicine man at that healing said to me, do you hunt?
And I said, I do, but it might not be a, a type of hunting you
are familiar with because I'm Fox hunting, British fox hunting.
And he said, that's not important.
I'm just getting it loud and clear from the spirit world that you
have to give it up and it's somehow connected to your son's autism.
I didn't even question it.
I, I gave it up right there and then and then.
A lot of really positive things in my life happened, like from that point when, and
then when we were got into Washington, DC and we went into the State Department.
Finally, we testified before Congress, congressional Human
Rights Caucus and all this stuff.
But it was when we walked into the State Department, we walked into the office of
a man who had been, was gonna give us an interview, and he happened to be Apache.
And he just looked at the guys that I was coming with.
He said, he said, I know exactly what you're dealing with.
I grew up on the reservation there.
And he just picked up the phone and he called the Botswana land Minister
in front of us and said, you guys are supposed to be our trade partners.
I've got, you know, five guys sitting here from the counter house, said
they've been tortured and da da da and illegally evicted, da da da.
What's going on?
And this had a massive se, seismic effect.
The woman who set up that meeting was called Rebecca Adamson, who's Lumbee
Indian from and ran First Nations Development Institute, which was basically
the force in America that supported our work in Africa, again, native America.
And then quite recently as recently as 2021, I was going through a personal,
real personal crisis and, I ended up with a Lakota medicine man who put me
through a ceremony that absolutely, absolutely dealt with the issue.
And I walked into that ceremony with the issue and I walked out of
that ceremony without the issue.
So, and I, I wonder how many people have a story like that.
I think more people, I happen to have a few of them, but I, I feel that Native
America has been subsidizing, if you like, white America for a very long time,
partly by simply virtue of geography.
It's your place with, to some degree guests, but equally by still
creating this sacred heartland.
And you know, that feeling, you, you, you've spent time on Navajo, you know
that when, particularly when you're down in the Southwest and you're on Navajo
Nation, Hopi Nation and those places, and some of the surrounding ones, you
absolutely feel that you are touching the living heart of the continent.
And I don't, I know even very sort of conservative, skeptical people,
white people would say the same thing.
There's something about Monument Valley, there's something about those landscapes.
There's something about Bryce Canyon or whatever.
You are now going back in there.
You have this dream, this quiet
Luther King type dream, although I wish you a much better outcome personally.
Do you, what do you see coming out of this place, this education and cultural
and service center that you are going to start, as you say, at the heart of
within two days drive of every Indian reservation, pretty much in the country
dream irrationally.
Please
don't let rationality hamper you.
Let's say 30 years after you die.
What would you like to 50 years after you die, what would you like
to see coming out of that place?
What change landscape would you like to see?
What's the legacy?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, I'm glad you asked that because this is something that brand
and I have been talking about and one of the things that I wanna do as Tom Hay
Group, because as we, you know, mentioned before, you know, we do our advocacy
in Washington DC and, you know, we've been, you know, basically guns for hire.
You know, people have an issue, they hire us and, and we take care of it for them.
I actually.
Using the guns Slinger analogy.
I don't wanna be the guns slinger, I wanna teach them how
to, how to shoot on their own.
Right.
I want, I wanna teach them how to advocate.
And ever since COVID being in DC doesn't matter because all meetings
are, you know, virtual nowadays anyway.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: You almost never go in and have an in-person meeting anywhere in DC
And even if you do, it's a hybrid meeting, you know, some people are there, the
major principles probably are elsewhere.
So being in DC doesn't matter anymore.
And so I think us moving to North Dakota is, you know, we're gonna,
we're gonna jump on that opportunity.
You don't have to be in DC to do this work anymore.
Right.
And, and if we can teach younger people how to do this, younger
people than me, obviously, who aren't jaded, is that what the
Rupert Isaacson: jd, after your name stands for?
Jeff Tomhave: We still believe that things can, can work well.
You know, you have to have that optimism, you have to have that energy
in order to, to realize those things.
So what I'm hoping to do is, is train, you know, a couple of dozen of people.
So they go back to their own home communities.
And so that 50 years from now, they're the ones who are doing this for themselves.
They're not hiring.
Any of the big fancy, you know, white shoe law firms here in, in
Washington, DC to do the work for them.
And believe me, most tribes do, including the Navajo Nation.
They hire the big DC law firms to do this stuff.
And I've been in meetings with those people.
They don't know anything that you've testified in front of Congress.
They don't know anything that you don't know how to do.
It's like, it's, it's, this is not rocket science.
It's not, there's not an alchemy here.
It's telling a good compelling story to a receptive audience.
And if they're not receptive now, make them receptive in the future.
That's a skillset that anyone has.
But there's, there's, you know, there's some particulars, you know, how to
do the dance steps, you know, so I'm wanna teach them the dance steps.
But basically, once they know the dance steps, they can, they
can do this however they want to.
And it's, it will be more effective if the advocacy comes from the
actual communities themselves.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Tomhave: Because they're the ones who are gonna be impacted
by whatever the outcome is.
And they're the ones who have the more compelling story.
And so, like I said, 50 years from now, I want them to have trained people so
that they're all doing it for themselves.
And maybe that that.
That alliance of tribes that I'm hoping for, maybe that'll happen after I'm gone.
Rupert Isaacson: I think it's a very, very logical first step.
Are there other, Tom have groups out there doing similar stuff?
Are you part of a growing network of people like you who are gonna start this
up across Native America and bring that, you know, because it, it sounds like
you, you are a, you guys would be a very important organ within a body of that,
but you might need other organs as well.
Do you, are there other people out there doing,
Jeff Tomhave: I wish, I wish I could say there are tons of us, but in
the almost 25 years that we've been doing this, we've never run across
anybody who does exactly what we do.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Tomhave: You know, and, and you know, to answer your, one
of your first questions of, you know, why not just be a regular
lawyer and make all kinds of money?
And I think you couldn't find two jds, you know, me and Brandy who make
less money because if you're gonna work in Indian country, you wanna do
gaming or you want to do a resource extraction, that's where the money is.
Yeah.
And you know, that's, that is nothing that we want any part of.
First of all, there are plenty of entities out there.
Who are doing that already.
We wouldn't, we wouldn't compete on that level, nor would we want to, we
take the hard approach of working on problems that aren't very lucrative.
You know, we've, we've actually had contracts where small communities have
paid us just a few thousand dollars, and we've worked for them for years.
And I mean, over those course of those years, they paid us a few thousand dollars
just because no one else would do it.
It's a, it's a relatively easy fix that they're asking for.
It just takes time.
Mm-hmm.
Other people wouldn't do that on another, a big huge Washington DC
law firm would not take a client on like that because they don't have the
money to pay for all the time that it would take to do the, we need to do.
But we've done it because no one else will.
And, and so I'm hoping that it, as we train other people, you know,
they can do it for themselves and, and they don't need to hire anybody.
But as far as I know, there is nobody that does what we do.
We know other consultants who are just, you know, single, sole proprietorships,
but they're working on specific things.
They don't do the advocacy like we do.
So there might be a, a connection to, to work in different avenues.
But nobody that we know of does what we do.
Rupert Isaacson: So 50 years from now, we've got, if, if
there's 500 and how many nations?
Jeff Tomhave: 75?
Rupert Isaacson: 575, then if you had 57.5,
Tom have groups dotted about the place.
Jeff Tomhave: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: You'd have a sporting chance of changing the social and
political landscape to a lasting degree.
I think you are actually enacting that dream.
And it's interesting that the only other group I came across, which was
First Nations Development Institute, who helped us so massively in Africa, run
by Rebecca Adamson Lumbee Indian living on the East Coast was about the, one
of the only other people I ever met who
Jeff Tomhave: mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Was doing something similar.
And of course, of course I just had to be, you know, on your website
while you were talking about all that, you know, and you kept saying
jd, after the names I was, had to.
Look up what that means because I'm British.
And it's, as you, well, you know, it's Juris doctor, a graduate level
professional degree for practicing law, similar to an MD for doctors
signifying completion of law school, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But what is the difference between JD and a simple lawyer or attorney
and why does it make a difference?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, a JD is just what you get from law school,
from graduating law school and you know, being a licensed attorney.
You know, you pass the state bar, whatever jurisdictions bar you're practicing in.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: So that you can represent clients, you know, in
that jurisdiction following that jurisdiction's, you know, procedures.
So that's what it is.
And so, you know, I never passed a bar.
'Cause I told you I never wanted to practice.
I just wanted to have the jd.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: So if you had, again, those 57 jds, some of whom have 57.5
actually some of whom have passed the bar, some of whom haven't, but all are working
within jurisprudence to this degree.
Yes.
I think that you are actually fulfilling that, the progress towards that dream.
And that's intriguing to me because in a politically very uncertain
time whether you are sitting in Europe or whether you're sitting.
Where you are sitting or whether you're sitting in other parts of the world.
There's a feeling of instability at the moment that I think is, we haven't
felt for 80 years maybe in the west.
And
there couldn't be a more optimal time for a dream like yours.
That goes back to the heart, I think, of what it means to be American.
Mm-hmm.
I also wonder if
something like Tom Hav group and the subgroups that come out of Tom Hav
group, once you plant yourself back there in North Dakota, and I, I could
see this having an international reach as well, where people might want to engage
you and the groups that you inspire, similar to the way that the Kalahari
Bushman engage first Nations Development Institute and also people practicing
international law, wanting to come an intern, you know, and get a sense of that.
You know, we, we benefited definitely from pro bono lawyers, many of whom were
young lawyers in DC who wanted to come and do pro bono work for us in Africa.
Get a real knowledge of how that whole thing worked.
I could see that happening the other way as well.
And people from other parts of the world wanting to come and work on
these issues with you all to get an understanding to then bring home
to their communities, even honestly within Europe we, we have these issues.
I'm very intrigued to see how you and Brandy
proceed.
When are you guys officially landing there at that old school
and hanging up the shield?
Hanging up the
Jeff Tomhave: sign?
Well, as, as you can see, we're still in the process of moving out of here.
So there's some stuff that we have to do to, to get this place, you know,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Jeff Tomhave: On the market.
But because it's it's winter here in, well, especially North Dakota right
now is here in Baltimore, I think it was, it's in the thirties, but this
morning when I went for a run and it was 25 degrees and I think that's what,
like three or four CEL minus Celsius.
Yeah, it's
Rupert Isaacson: minus three or s
Jeff Tomhave: so, so it's, it's still pretty cold.
So we gotta wait till winter to be over in North Dakota before we can go in, because
Rupert Isaacson: that's August, right?
Jeff Tomhave: Well, April.
April so probably mid-April is when we're finally gonna out.
Be leaving here.
So hopefully we'll have this place up on the market, you
know, May 1st and we'll be there.
And then we'll be, you know, rehabbing the school.
And first we have to build our, our own, our own living space.
'cause it is just a school.
But once we do, we'll hope, hope you come by and have a
Rupert Isaacson: I would love to.
I would love to.
And North Dakota's a state I've never been to, so I've never been
to either of the Dakotas and I've, I've been intrigued by them forever.
So I can see it on, on the horizon.
And I wanna have you guys, both you and Brandy back on the show.
Let's give it, you know, a year, 18 months and see where you guys are at, you know.
I'll also be coming back to Montana in in September for the same event.
So, you know, I dunno if you, and one thing I would love to do is
get involved with what you are doing on the mental health, neuro,
you know, neuropsychiatric side.
Mm-hmm.
And I know that there are also people out there within Native
America doing that work very well, like Jessica White Plume and so on.
Mm-hmm.
And people like that, that I could learn a lot from.
So, yeah, I think it's an ongoing conversation and I, I
would love to work together.
Yes, there's autism and there's all that stuff out there in
Native America, you know?
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
And I, and I believe Jessica is about four hours away from where, where we'll be.
So yes.
Perfect.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so it's watch this space and Jeff,
Tom have, has a dream lads.
So let's let's dream it with him.
Alright.
Yeah.
For a better world.
Jeff.
It's been amazing.
Thanks so much for, for coming on.
Well,
Jeff Tomhave: thanks for having me.
Rupert Isaacson: Just give us the, or I guess I can give it to you 'cause
I'm on your website as I speak where I was and then I, I went to, so
Tom hav group, T-O-M-H-A-V-E group.
Dot
Jeff Tomhave: com.
Rupert Isaacson: Dot com, right.
And the, the work is really broad.
You know, I, I was, I was cruising around on your site.
Looking at you, you, you've talked about some of the work that you've
done, but you know, there's also roads, jails missing, an indigenous mi missing
and murdered indigenous persons.
How you do what you do, your cancer watch stuff.
Your there, there, there's so much on here.
I do really recommend listeners, viewers go on Tom have group.com
and have a look at the work that they do.
And if you are a young aspiring lawyer or other person who might like to.
Get involved in some way and perhaps internal or something.
I would suggest that you reach out to Jeff and Brandy through that website.
Can they do that?
Can people do that?
Jeff Tomhave: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Okay.
Jeff Tomhave: Just look just email info@togroup.com
and we'll get it
Rupert Isaacson: info@tomhavegroup.com.
Yep.
Alright, brilliant.
I look forward to the next meeting.
Jeff Tomhave: All right, me too.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Happy moving.
Jeff Tomhave: Thanks.
Rupert Isaacson: Bye bye.
Bye.
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
If you did, please help us to make more.
Please like, subscribe, tell a friend, give us a thumbs up.
If you'd like to support us on Patreon, please go to my website, rupertisakson.
com.
And if you'd like to find out about our certification courses with.
autism, education, horsemanship, everyday shamanism.
There's a whole range of cool stuff.
Putting a show together like this is not an easy task.
If you'd like to support us, please consider going to our Patreon page
and showing us some love there.
Even the smallest donation, it really helps us to keep the good content coming.
So go to rupertisakson.
com and click on the Patreon link.
Not to mention our excellent merch.
Please go to our shop and check out some of our really cool
rock and roll themed merch.
T shirts, hoodies, all that sort of thing.
rupertisatson.
com, it's all there.
I can't wait for our next guest and also to meet you there.
In the meantime, remember, live free.
Ride free.