Taught by elders, they listen and lead

By Paul Levy

Star Tribune

      Tony LookingElk still relishes the childhood visits he'd make from Minneapolis to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. There, he would sit at his grandfather's feet, mesmerized by the soothing cadence of the older man's voice. It mattered little that his grandfather's words were in Lakota, a language LookingElk didn't speak.

      "I couldn't respond to him, but I listened," LookingElk said. "It's hard to say how important listening is to me."

      "There is wisdom in the words of our elders," said Justin Kii Huenemann. "When the elders speak, you're there to listen first -- and to learn."

      LookingElk is 39 and Huenemann is only 30, but the urban Indian community now listens to them -- and with the blessings of some of the community's better-known elders. As cochairmen of the Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors (MUID), leadership body of the urban Indian community, LookingElk and Huenemann are key voices in determining the political, economic and cultural future of the Little Earth community.

      "It's an interesting dynamic because in Indian culture, you're taught to be respectful of elders and it's natural for elders to be leaders," said Robert Lilligren, Minneapolis City Council vice president and a White Earth tribal member.

      "We needed new blood," said Nina Mata, 52, finance director for the Peacemakers Center for native youth in Minneapolis. "Tony and Justin are smart. They have energy. We needed somebody dynamic to step forward and say, 'I represent the Indian community and this is what I'm all about.' They've shown many of the elders the way."

      They've done so by assuming leadership of a complex MUID group that, for two decades, has consisted of more than 50 organizations, executive directors and leaders of the American Indian community. MUID's role becomes even more complicated and diverse when considering that as many as 70 different tribes have lived in the urban area, LookingElk said.

      "We don't have one voice," LookingElk said. "There's no snap answer to any of our issues."

      Meeting the second Tuesday of each month at the American Indian Center on Franklin Avenue, members of MUID discuss a wide range of topics -- family preservation, civil rights, education, community and police relations, health disparities and civic and political accountability.

      Among guests at the most recent meeting was Minneapolis Police Chief Bill McManus. LookingElk and Huenemann are scheduled to meet today with Archbishop Harry Flynn.

      "MUID has been the place to go if you want to address an Indian concern," said Peter McLaughlin, Hennepin County commissioner. "It's a good place to get a read on the Indian community and to get reaction on proposals. And there are no stronger voices than Tony's and Justin's."

Different styles

      LookingElk, current president of the Urban Coalition, is "more of a big-picture guy," Lilligren said. "He sits back at meetings," said Gail Dorfman, Hennepin County commissioner. "Sometimes you think he's not listening, or even sleeping. And then he quietly, simply, humbly weighs in. The reaction from others participating is often, 'Wow! I didn't think of it that way, and he's so right.' "

      Ask for LookingElk's résumé and he responds: "People want to hear it is higher education. That is very often thought of as the only way an American Indian can move forward. People want to think it is work experience and knowledge that helps me. It is hard for people to accept that it is my grandparents, parents, brothers and sister, nephews and niece, and many layers of relations that have contributed to my values and beliefs.

      "Whatever is determined to be my level of success has everything to do with what I have been taught by my community, family and culture," said LookingElk, who is single. "Work put food on the table, education created acceptance in the greater world, but my teachings allow me to matter."

      His parents were a generation removed from the boarding-school era, when American Indians were taken from reservations by the government and sent away to prepare for assimilation into white society. LookingElk's father, a courier, was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His mother, an upholsterer, grew up on the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. They moved to Minneapolis, where dad worked nights and mom worked days.

      "There was always a parent around," LookingElk said.

      LookingElk has studied at a number of universities -- earning degrees at DePaul in Chicago and Minnesota State-Moorhead while also taking law courses at DePaul and William Mitchell in St. Paul. At DePaul, he said, he felt "challenged by every professor to see if an American Indian could pass a college-level course."

      He earned a degree in sociology at DePaul in 1988, spent four years doing social work in Chicago's American Indian community and then returned to Minneapolis, where he has served on a variety of boards and task forces.

      He was selected chairman of MUID in 1999, an unpaid position in an organization that has no budget, almost by default, he said. "I was their fourth choice." But his responsibilities to the Urban Coalition and other boards and tasks forces seemed too much. He tried to quit MUID. But the board rejected his resignation and offered a compromise -- a cochairman.

That was Huenemann.

      Blue-eyed, with matching hoop earrings and a long braided ponytail, Huenemann is a former high-school track star who, before hurting his back, would go to any neighborhood playground looking for a game of hoops, and still dreams of the day he'll dunk a basketball.

      "Justin is the one who delves into details and cranks out the analysis," Lilligren said. Eloquent and articulate, Huenemann has a passionate tone that often speaks as loudly as his words.

      "Both Justin and Tony have this passion," said Clyde Bellecourt, 67, the Minneapolis Indian leader who was thrust into the national spotlight in 1968 with the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM). "We wanted to create a program that would keep young Indian people -- kids who didn't have a proper education or might be headed for jail -- keep these kids from just standing around street corners. Justin seemed like a natural to run it."

Finding his place

      The Government Center office where Huenemann serves as community catalyst for the American Indian Families Project is a far cry from the Navajo reservation on which his mother was raised. Most of the homes there still are without running water and electricity, he said.

      Huenemann grew up watching the disruption of stereotypes. His father came from a large, conservative German family in Iowa. A musicologist, he was attracted to reservations in Nebraska and Pine Ridge, where he was a pioneer in field recordings 50 years ago. He went to Arizona to record and became immersed in Navajo culture. When Huenemann's maternal grandparents refused to let his father date his mother, his father slept for a month in a tent he set up near their home.

His perseverance eventually paid off.

      Young Justin's parents moved to Pine Ridge, then to Mitchell, S.D. "All of the sudden, I was at an all-white high school in a town which was wealthy, compared to where I'd come from -- so wealthy that all of us on the high-school basketball team had matching basketball shoes," Huenemann recalled.

      A singer, painter, established wood-carving artist and trumpet player, he considered returning to Arizona or possibly trying a career in art, but instead chose the University Minnesota and a major in architecture.

      "I'd sit in the dorms and knew that it just wasn't where I belonged," said Huenemann, who said his middle name, Kii, means "boy."I thought, 'OK, I'm alone. I've got to go find Indians.' "

      He found the American Indian Resource Center and, from there, the Heart of the Earth Survival School. Huenemann happened to be there the day a teacher was fired. He was asked if he could teach.

      "Sure," he said. He was 20.

      "I'd ask kids, 10th- to 12th-graders, 'What's your tribe?' And they had no idea. They had no connection," Huenemann said. "Here are all these Indian kids who didn't know who they were as people. How could that be?"

      The question continues to haunt Huenemann, who is married, has a 4-year-old son and another child due in August. All the while, LookingElk was asking similar questions.

      "How do you push back some of the pacification of the American Indian community?" he asked.

      "We're redeveloping Franklin Avenue, but why aren't there American Indian businesses?"

      "We don't celebrate enough. How do you celebrate poverty and frustration? But we should be celebrating the people we know."

      Observed Bill Means, a longtime leader of the urban Indian community and director of a state employment program for the economically disadvantaged: "Rather than impose their leadership on the community, these two young gentlemen have asked questions first. They were highly encouraged to take leadership positions because they were active participants long before they became leaders."

      Bellecourt said he once wondered "if we've done enough to provide young leadership." But, "Justin and Tony aren't afraid to take on the hard issues. They've shown up when we've had marches on police brutality."

      The marriage of the cochairmen may still be in its honeymoon stage. "My wife teases me that I check in with Tony so often, it's like he's my wife," Huenemann said.

      "Our effectiveness depends on our ability to listen," LookingElk said. "We've learned that it isn't the speaker that creates knowledge, it's the discourse after."