Board Member Profile: 
Tracy Edwards, Chairwoman, Redding Rancheria

Redding Rancheria Tribal Chair and CILS Board Member, Tracy Edwards

On Work and Home Life

CILS: Tracy, you’re Tribal Chair, mother of three, licensed attorney, CILS Board Member. Did I leave anything out? Probably.

EDWARDS: [laughter] Oh gosh. I’m, married. Let’s see. What else have I got myself into lately? I serve on numerous Boards. Community Boards in our local area – the Youth Violence Prevention Council for the Shasta County, I was recently a Pacheco School Board member, and I’m on the Redding Chamber of Commerce Board. [laughter] I think that’s it right now. I really streamlined actually.

CILS: [laughter] Do you still have any time to sleep?

EDWARDS: No I don’t. My three-year-old is the reason I don’t sleep.

CILS: Of all the things that you’ve achieved so far, what are you most proud of?

EDWARDS: Honestly trying – this is really simple – trying to be a good mom and a successful working mother. Balancing the two. When I do it well, both are my best successes I think.

CILS: Do you have any tricks in that regard?

EDWARDS: [laughs] Really keeping things in perspective. There’s time when it swings in the balance of a lot going on at work, and then when I complete a project I really take time off and spend some time at home – work some short days. That’s one of the wonderful things about working for my Tribe. We’re very family oriented and so after a big project is completed I just go to my boss and say, "I need a couple days off," or, "I need to leave early every day this week because my kids miss me," and there’s never been a time that I was told no.

CILS: I’m wondering if you could tell me about what motivated you to become an attorney.

EDWARDS: Since I was small, I’ve always said that I wanted to be an attorney. By the time I got into law school, our Tribe was really moving forward and so my first year in law school, my Tribe contacted me [about working for them], and I knew that that was where I would go. My second year in law school, I came home and worked in the Realty Department – it was called the Realty Department then – now it’s our Housing and Land Acquisition Department. It was an excellent place to go so that I could become familiar with our Tribal operations. I had lived out of town for a year, and I started with the Tribe when we were just ready to finish building our Administrative office so it was wonderful for me to come back. I graduated in ‘87 and moved away to go to school and only got home on occasion to visit my grandma here on the reservation, and so I hadn’t been back in awhile.

On the Most Important Issues Facing California Indians

CILS: Could you talk a bit about what you think are the most important issues facing California Indians today.

EDWARDS: I think one of the most important is the fee to trust process that’s going on with land and future land access for Tribes. That’s been really important to our Tribe. Health care in the Native American community is a big issue – ensuring that we have the funding and the proper health care for our communities. And education.

CILS: Could you talk about what some of the challenges have been for your Tribe?

EDWARDS: Our Tribe is a Tillie Hardwick Tribe, you know that. I think that’s why Barbara Murphy, our CEO, has been so supportive of CILS. It’s one of the major contributions we make every year. We’re still considered a small tribe – in terms of size of casinos and membership size – but CILS is one of the major groups we support every year because we’re very grateful for the Tillie Hardwick case. When we had no funding, CILS helped us out so much. Part of the Tillie Hardwick case was to take our Tribal lands back into trust, and here we are, 2002, and that still hasn’t happened. We are still trying to fight the battle of completing that case out to the end. And what is said would be done will be done. Still, it’s very frustrating and sort of disheartening. Although we know what the intent was, it just hasn’t happened yet. I think it’s just bureaucracy at work.

Redding Rancheria has a health clinic so I think that’s why we’re pretty in tune with health care issues. Our health care clinic has been able to hire four very good physicians – open-minded and just really good physicians. We’ve also started a well baby care program in the last couple years, and that’s just wonderful because it’s such a problem for mothers not to have health care until the end. With this program, the child starts off fine – we can ensure that our babies coming into the world have a good start – and we go all the way up to our elders, who are fighting the battle with diabetes. We’ve lost some elders in the last few years to diabetes. So the whole thing was to catch our members younger. We’ve been able to protect the 20- and 30-something people and get them back on the right track, to prevent diabetes.

CILS: We understand that the Rancheria just opened up some new facilities.

EDWARDS: The expansion? Yeah, we called it a soft opening on April 1 – we cut the ribbon with a few of our elders. Our official grand opening is May 9^th, which is almost 10 years to the day when we opened the door for our new expansion. It’s beautiful. And it’s a cultural building. Our people were basket weavers. We have a 17-foot-high Wintu Burden basket that stands on top of the ceiling. The design is taken from baskets that the Tribe has. Inside, we have basketry and weaving – different designs throughout – and we have a running water feature, depicting Clear Creek, which is right outside of the casino. And we have glass etchings with indigenous animals of the Clear Creak area. We tried really hard to bring in cultural elements.

CILS: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about some factors in the Tribe’s success over the last 10 years or so.

EDWARDS: It’s funny, I talked a little bit about this the other night. One of our major beliefs is that we should have our tribal members working in key positions. It’s so obvious that when you train and hire your tribal members in decision-making positions, you’re going to succeed – right now, they may not have the education, like going out and hiring a highly educated person, but we’re getting there. And what we will always have is the heart in it. We all have a common goal and we know that, we work together and we aren’t leaving tomorrow. We’re in it for the long run, so we think long term.

One of the highlights this year was working with our District Attorney’s office and passing a resolution where we would honor wage assignments for a place owing child support. That was a big issue and it took a couple of years to figure out what we were going to do. Our District Attorney’s office worked very well with us in understanding some of the issues for our employees and Native Americans. They understood that there were some different circumstances and we worked out issues with them and in turn we agreed to work with them in collecting wage garnishments for people who owed child support. I think that by doing some of those things, even when we may not have had to because we’re a tribal government, we gained a lot of respect from the different agencies in our community.

There have been lots of times working with various agencies that we’ve said, "Well, we don’t have to call them and tell them we’re doing this, but we recognize that it’s a good idea." And I think when we started doing that, we gained respect. Our local county Social Services Department is very respectful of our Indian Child Welfare Department. We stepped in on a couple of cases and they were very impressed with the way we handled them, and now they actually contact us when there is a potential Indian child welfare issue that we may not have even known about that somehow ended up in the County Social Services Department first, and they will call us and ask us how a problem should be handled....I think it’s really snowballing. When you work out something with one agency, another agency gets wind of that – that we’re very responsible and respectful people, and so we get calls all the time to work with different agencies.

CILS: What kind of new ventures does the Tribe have planned for the immediate future?

EDWARDS: Well, the casino expansion was about a year-long project and honestly I’m hoping that we will take a breather, although right now we have a Hilton Inn Project moving forward. We’ve done the groundbreaking and we’ve done the site work and the actual construction should be starting anytime.

A long term project we have is a health village. We want to do a whole health village on traditional healing, preventative care, a youth center, a whole range of things associated with health. The last two years we’ve lost a substantial number of elders. There was a sense of sadness when we lost some of the elders before they were able to see this to the final end. Not that that this is the end – but to see what we have here today.

CILS: I want to ask you about where you see CILS going and what role you see it having over its next 35 years.

EDWARDS: I don’t want to say struggle – maybe opportunity. Some of the tribes – and this is some of them – are going to, or are, doing very well financially. And there will be a few more tribes in California that are going to expand economically and do really well. I think that those tribes need to help CILS, because there are so many tribes in California that don’t have the resources to tackle the big issues like the trust issue, health care. You know, all sorts of Indian issues – land, things that are facing the majority of California Indians. And the majority of California Indians don’t have the resources that the gaming tribes do. And I think that is an area that CILS has always done. Our Tribe is a prime example of seeing a benefit from something that CILS did for us. I think that CILS still fills a huge area of need for Native Americans in California. The non-gaming tribes are going to need assistance and help if they choose to do a project – or whatever it is that they choose to do with some of the funding they’re going to get. It’s a lot of money but it certainly isn’t enough, and I think that’s actually a big opportunity for CILS to help non-gaming tribes do projects with their trust funds.

CILS: I’m wondering if you have any words of wisdom or encouragement for young people who aspire to work in public service or work for their tribes.