Today’s guest is Ashton Martin ’20, a health policy analyst for United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit is an intertribal organization that advocates on behalf of thirty-three federally recognized Tribal Nations, from the Northeastern Woodlands to the Everglades and across the Gulf of Mexico. On this episode, Ashton shares about their social justice work as student body president at Carolina (and reflections from the2023 reunion of former student body presidents at the Morehead-Cain Foundation), their path to working in public policy for Tribal Nations as a recent graduate, and the complexities of working in tribal law and policy. Ashton also gives guidance in using respectful language when referring to Tribal Nations.
Today’s guest is Ashton Martin ’20, a health policy analyst for United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit is an intertribal organization that advocates on behalf of thirty-three federally recognized Tribal Nations, from the Northeastern Woodlands to the Everglades and across the Gulf of Mexico.
On this episode, Ashton shares about their social justice work as student body president at Carolina (and reflections from the 2023 reunion of former student body presidents at the Morehead-Cain Foundation), their path to working in public policy for Tribal Nations as a recent graduate, and the complexities of working in tribal law and policy. Ashton also gives guidance in using respectful language when referring to Tribal Nations.
Prior to joining the fund, Ashton worked as the Rodney B. Lewis Fellow in American Indian Law and Policy at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. During their time at Carolina, Ashton worked as a strategy and fundraising intern at Feedback Labs in Washington, D.C., a company co-founded by Dennis Whittle ’83. They previously worked as a summer investigations intern at the Cook County Public Defender in Chicago law officeand as chief of staff for Daymaker, a charitable giving platform led by CEO Brent Macon ’12.
Ashton spoke with Morehead-Cain at a café in Dupont Circle before the 2023 D.C. Regional Event for alumni and scholars.
Music credits
The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
(Sarah)
Ashton, thank you so much for speaking with Catalyze here this afternoon.
(Ashton)
Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s an honor to speak with you today.
(Sarah)
And the last time you were on campus was the student body presidents’ reunion. I would just love to hear how that was and who you might have met there or reconnected with.
(Ashton)
Yeah, absolutely. It was really such an honor to be back on campus in February for the Morehead student body president reunion weekend. I hadn’t really been on campus that much since graduation, I guess, a few times, and I got to meet several new student, or not new, older student body presidents that I hadn’t had the privilege of meeting before. I am, so far, the most recent Morehead SBP. And then before me was Hogan Medlin back in, I think, 2011. So it was really nice to see people from different periods and different circumstances at Carolina. We also got to meet a student body president from the 1960s, I believe he was class of 1960. And that was just such an honor to see how things have both stayed the same and change in the years since.
(Sarah)
Can you speak to some of those big changes or some of the through lines that have remained consistent?
(Ashton)
One thing that it was very clear has stayed the same is that Carolina students have always been very involved in advocating for what’s right and what needs to change in the state and the country. At the time, you know, he was dealing with the civil rights movement, and I was dealing with Silent Sam, but the commonality of struggling with white supremacy and racism on campus has unfortunately persisted. But it’s good to see that students continue to fight and advocate for what’s right. And things are obviously quite different. The demographics of the campus are quite different. It’s grown quite significantly since then. It’s a huge university now, and it’s really wonderful to see that, like we had mentioned maybe earlier, that student body presidents have gone from being sort of the same sort of demographic to being people of color and queer people and being more representative of the community that we represent, and it’s been wonderful to see.
(Sarah)
And what was it like to graduate in 2020, and did you feel like you were kind of, I don’t know, I think it seemed like you’d feel like you robbed from the last bit of time you had, or how did that chapter wrap up for you?
(Ashton)
Yeah, it was definitely an interesting time to graduate. COVID obviously hit in March of 2020. We graduated in May. As student body president, I was looking forward to those last two months where I could sort of let go and let the next person take over and enjoy the last couple of months with my friends, and go to the events that we’d always thought about, the banquet and the graduation and all the ceremonies and things that obviously didn’t end up happening. And it sort of felt like we didn’t get to close that chapter. We sort of all just left, and that was the end of it. But it also allowed a lot of us, I think, to grow in ways that we hadn’t before. Going into a pandemic after graduation is, I guess, sort of like going into a recession or something. The job prospects were different. We all had to sort of reevaluate what we wanted to do and what we were going to do, and I think a lot of us ended up better for it at the end of the day, even though we might not be doing what we thought we were going to do before.
(Sarah)
Is that the case for you? You’re now a health policy analyst for United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund. Can you share just what your thought process was, graduating amidst COVID and determining your options, and how you landed on what you wanted to do to start out?
(Ashton)
For sure. I studied political science and philosophy at UNC. And then I always had an idea that I was going to go into some sort of policy or advocacy work. I didn’t know if that was going to be actually working on the Hill or working more in a policy facing job. The first job I took actually was at a startup currently run by a Morehead alum, Daymaker run by Brent Macon. I was chief of staff yet there, but I didn’t end up staying very long. I got offered a fellowship at a law firm to be the American Indian Law and Policy Fellow. And I’d honestly never conceived of the idea that I could combine my heritage and my love of policy into advocating for Tribal Nations and Native American people. But in that fellowship, I learned that policy and Native American policy is really where I want to be for the rest of, maybe for the rest of my life, who knows? It’s definitely something very heart centered for me, and I guess never saw myself specifically working in health policy. But weirdly enough, I was pre-med for, like, two years of my undergrad. I liked science. I was no good at math, and that’s really what ended up killing that dream for me.
I always liked the social aspect, social determinants of health and the societal pressures and things that shape health care in the United States. And it’s even more of a specific and pressing problem in Tribal Nations and Indian Country in general. And so I’m really quite honored to be able to work in health policy now, in advancing the trust and treaty obligations that the United States owes to Tribal Nations to provide for our health care and well being. And, yeah, it’s not exactly what I thought that I’d be doing, but it’s really quite an honor.
(Sarah)
And what was it about working in the law firm on Indian law that gave you this idea that you could be doing this long term and even as a profession?
(Ashton)
I guess, first, it’s a pretty niche industry. There’s not that many people that are working in tribal law and policy. But, I had the privilege of working with what is considered to be one of the most premier law groups in Indian law in the United States, one of the first that existed to help Tribal Nations litigating against the United States and policy work. And seeing these people who had dedicated their whole lives—some of them being tribal citizens themselves, some of them not—was really so inspiring because it’s a specific and sort of niche area of policy that I don’t know, it’s just hard to describe. It’s just so fascinating the differences between how the law works for Tribal Nations and how it works with what most people consider to be law work. I’m inspired and energized a lot by just the people that I work with. I work with other tribal citizens. I am so privileged to be able to travel to our Tribal Nations to absorb their culture and their traditions, because even though there are a lot of commonalities among Tribal Nations in our cultures, there are so many differences as well. And our membership spans from the Northeast Woodlands to the Gulf of Mexico and down to the Everglades.
And so the diversity in our area and the beauty of the culture and just the care that we’ve always had for each other, and it’s always been a sort of, we’re in this together. This work is hard and it’s difficult, but we’re all doing it for the right reasons. And we’re endowed by our Creator, in whatever sense that the Creator is in your culture, to do this work and advocate for our people. And that energizes me more than even yoga can. It’s just the dedication to doing the work that I love.
(Sarah)
It’s very cool to see how you’ve just sought for justice throughout your time so far in your current work and on campus, and just seems like that’s been something that’s backed a lot of what you do, which is really neat to see.
I want to ask about the vernacular of how you describe Tribal Nations or if you wouldn’t mind sharing about your own heritage and what you prefer, with the caveat that, of course, it is personal. As we talked a little bit about before, recording and how this is right now, but doesn’t speak for the future and probably changes over geography and things like that. But can you help our listeners have a better understanding of how to refer to some of the terms that go into your work each day?
(Ashton)
Absolutely. Like you said, it’s sort of a complicated situation. You’ve heard me say Tribal Nation over and over again. That is what we prefer to use to speak about, especially my organization's membership. We are comprised of 33 federally recognized Tribal Nations in the south and eastern part of the United States. I am personally from the Sappony Nation. It's in North Carolina and southern Virginia. We've existed there since time immemorial. And then in terms of how we refer to ourselves personally, that is, well, obviously a personal issue. I typically refer to myself as Native American. Many people refer to themselves as American Indian, though. There are also distinctions for Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians. Yeah, so it’s a complicated question, but we really believe that language has a lot of power. My organization specifically, we firmly believe that the language that we use, writ large, the United States and others use to refer to Tribal Nations is rooted in colonialism and paternalism, and we want to fight against that.
Yeah, we believe that language is rooted in that colonial power that has existed for hundreds of years now. And we believe that the language that we choose to refer to our membership and in our work, speaking in our talking points and our comments to the federal government, it’s important that that language is representative of our people, that it’s rooted in our traditions and our ways of life. And so, yeah, language has power, but it’s also quite complicated and a really personal thing for many people.
(Sarah)
So at the interpersonal level, just thinking of our scholars and being on campus, is the best route to just ask someone if they have indicated in some way that they have this heritage, what their preferred way of describing it is, or what are other ways that students could care for each other better in this context?
(Ashton)
Definitely. Well, when it comes to Native students in particular, I always recommend asking how they would like to be referred to. A lot of kids of color over the years are always asked, like, “What are you?” And that is a question no one should ever be asking anyone. We’re all human, that’s the answer to that question. If someone has indicated to you that they have Native heritage, asking, “Oh, what is your heritage?” is a good question. “What nation do you belong to?” “How do you prefer to be addressed?” Because some Nations have specific words that they like to use, and Indian Country, we like to say, is not a monolith. And so it has to be a question that’s asked. And it’s complicated because of, like we said, the colonialism and paternalism that exists has put Native people in this box and also estranged a lot of them from their culture. And so there’s a lot of reconnecting and learning that even native people have to do to unlearn some of that colonialist language and refer to ourselves in a way that is more aligned with us and not with the people who decided that we’re called Indians even though we’re not anywhere near India.
(Sarah)
Just like a lot of things in the US, if you look back at the history, it is so estranged from the terms that we use from its original meaning and how we arrived there. But it’s really helpful to hear that context from you.
What are the agendas or strategic objectives that you all are trying to work with right now on behalf of this consortium of Tribal Nations? Is there anything you’d want to share about what is top of mind or what’s coming down next?
(Ashton)
Definitely. We consider ourselves an intertribal organization. Consortium is a word that’s fine, but it can be more specific. There are consortiums that exist in Alaska, but we consider ourselves an intertribal organization. We have quite a lot of work going on. Specifically for me as a health policy analyst, recently we’ve been working to advocate for a better budget. The President’s budget for fiscal year 2024 was just released a month ago. And since then, we’ve been consulting with specifically the Indian Health Service and the Department of Health and Human Services to advocate for more resources, better resources, better administrative resources. Tribal Nations are often distributed funds and resources through grant mechanisms. But grants sort of assume that we are not sovereign nations, and we are. The trust and treaty obligations that the United States has to Tribal Nations exist on a Nation to Nation basis. And it’s an obligation that exists regardless of our economic status as nations or other factors. It’s inherent in our rights as Tribal Nations. And we believe that grant mechanisms are not fulfilling the trust obligation that needs to come through full and mandatory funding of the Indian Health Service, and more expansion of Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDEAA) compacting and contracting.
ISDEAA allows Tribal Nations to take over some administration of government services like healthcare or housing, or education and run them specifically through the Tribal Nation and with an indigenous lens. Hard word. And that’s one of our big pushes recently is, well, it has been for probably 30 years, is pushing for more expansion of ISDEA contracting and compacting. And beyond that, my colleagues are working on things like land buybacks, better incorporating Tribal Nations into federal permitting processes. That’s a pretty broken system right now. We have what’s called a Marshall Plan for Tribal Nations. So the Marshall Plan was, in very simple terms, what helped reconstruct Europe after World War II, and it was done in close collaboration with the nations that were affected and that were being rebuilt. And we believe that since the United States has, you know, neglected to fulfill these trust and treaty obligations for hundreds of years now, that real improvement and real fulfillment of those obligations needs to come in a sustained plan that would incorporate Tribal Nations specifically in a Nation to Nation basis, and include a huge influx of resources, financial and technical and otherwise, to help Tribal Nations rebuild from these centuries of discrimination and racism and structural problems that have persisted in our communities because of the actions taken by the federal government.
And so, the leaders of my organization are currently advocating for our Marshall Plan. We’ve created a quite lengthy, specific, and comprehensive plan for what a Marshall Plan would look like in Indian Country. But we also believe that it would require lots of close collaboration and consultation with Tribal Nations. And so things like that we’re working on. We believe that the current atmosphere in tribal law and policy is sort of fundamentally broken in ways, and we believe that relationship needs to change fundamentally in order to better and more fully fulfill those obligations. So we have a lot of work going on, but some real meaningful stuff that people before me have been working on, and I will continue to work on for the future.
(Sarah)
Does the fund also help with this deficit of resources in making up that lost ground? Or is it more so in the advocacy work and trying to move on these agendas with the Marshall Plan and other things in the works?
(Ashton)
Yeah, totally. So USET is sort of a two-pronged organization. USET itself, United South and Eastern Tribes, is a nonprofit that was created in 1969 by five of our original founding members. Even though our membership has varying priorities, we believe that there is that strength in a unified front and that together we can get more work, more advocacy, done. But USET was originally not an advocacy organization specifically, so it gets a bit complicated with the so USET is a 501(c)(3), which is a nonprofit, and that comes with certain restrictions on advocacy work that you’re allowed to do with the federal government. But USET has existed itself since 1969. We assist with technical things. We assist with grant writing. So to your resources question, we do assist our member Tribal Nations in increasing their resources by helping them apply for grants. We have also been the primary grantee for our group of member nations, which strengthens our chances of getting funding. And then we also, since the 90s, have had a Tribal Epidemiology Center, which serves the entire, what’s called the Nashville region of the Indian Health Service, which pretty much encompasses the entire East Coast, more or less.
And our TEC, our Tribal Epidemiology Center, does that technical surveillance work and public health support for our nation. So we also have an economic development side. And then the 501(c)(3) side existed for obviously much longer. And then in 2014, USET decided that we needed to form a 501(c)(4), which comes with a bit more flexibility in the advocacy work that you’re allowed to do. So we founded the SPF, the Sovereignty Protection Fund, the C(4) arm of USET, to do that advocacy work and be closer to DC and the work that’s going on here and allows us to be a bit more flexible. And so I’m on technically a separate team from USET, which USET is headquartered in Nashville, and so we have about 70, 80 employees, most of them on the technical side. And then I’m on currently a three-person team here in DC that does the advocacy and policy work.
(Sarah)
It seems like there’s just so many different legal restrictions and even just in nonprofit world, what you can and cannot do. How do you stay patient but on mission in policy work when we know that policy has very slow wheels at times?
(Ashton)
Definitely. It’s definitely slow going sometimes. For example, last year, Congress for the first time instituted advance appropriations for the Indian Health Service, which means that instead of being subjected to the discretionary budget process every year, where Congress in recent years has come to government shutdowns, and this huge fight over the budget wasn’t always the case. But advanced appropriations was something that people have been working on in Indian law for 20, 30 years, and I was still working on it last year. And so it’s really slow-going work, but when that policy was finally realized, it has made measurable significant differences in the delivery of health care in Indian Country. And that’s sort of what keeps us going. It’s not one of those industries where you get a lot of wins, but you celebrate all the wins that you do get, at least for a little bit, and then we’re moving on to the next thing because there’s just always so much more work to do. But I don’t know, I do feel empowered at times that elders and people that I really, truly respect have been and did work on the same things that I work on, and that something that I do will continue to the people that come after me.
We do like to say occasionally that we would like to work ourselves out of a job, if possible. If we could get all the things that we wanted, I wouldn’t need to advocate on behalf of our Nations. I wouldn’t need to do this work. I wouldn’t need to write into the Department of Health and Human Services every other week to tell them about regulations that we think are no good. And that would be the ideal. But for now, you just have to celebrate the wins that you have, realize that you’re part of a bigger cycle and a circle of work that’s going on, and I think that’s really what keeps me going.
(Sarah)
Ashton, it’s so great to speak with you. Are there any books or podcast recommendations or other information sources that you’d want to share as pertains to the things that we’ve talked about, for anyone who’s more interested in learning about the eight Tribes in, federally organized Tribes, in North Carolina or in the US, wherever they might be?
(Ashton)
Definitely. For learning more about the eight tribes, specifically in North Carolina, especially for those who have the privilege of still being on campus, please go visit the American Indian Center at Carolina. There’s also the Carolina Indian Circle, which is the student run organization, that’s sort of an affinity group, but the membership is open to friends of the community. And the wonderful folks at the AIC, The American Indian Center, are always willing to educate people, share resources. The North Carolina Museum of History also does programming every November, and they have folks that come and educate. And then there are also cultural events to go to. UNC had our powwow in March. NC State and Duke also have them. Go to these cultural events, learn, and be embedded in the community, And then, you know, for other resources, whatever resources you’re thinking of finding and reading, just, one, make sure that they are written by a native person. There’s a lot of things that are written about us, not by us. And that’s another thing we like to say: nothing about us without us. And so make sure that the resources that you’re seeking out are written by Native people, are rooted in indigenous work.
One of my favorite books is Braiding Sweetgrass by Dr. Kimmerer. It focuses on how science and indigenous teaching about science, which we’ve always been practicers of science since time immemorial, are combining. And that’s, I think, often given as an example of a good starter book for people to get into indigenous ideologies and things. And then, one of my favorites is an anthology of short stories, speculative fiction about the future of indigenous people, and how some of them, what happens to indigenous people when the Earth is dying and people are thinking about going to Mars. What does that mean for the original caretakers of this land? And the book is called Love After the End, and I think that it’s a really good resource for modern, queer, indigenous people, and we exist, we’re out here. So, yeah, lots of resources. But do your research in whatever resource that you’re thinking of seeking out, but please do seek it out. Not enough people read and learn about Native Americans and the indigenous culture of the United States, and it really is truly beautiful.
(Sarah)
Ashton, thank you so much.
(Ashton)
Thank you so much. This has been really wonderful.