Building partnerships and fostering relationships among different communities comes naturally to Ernest House Jr.
Serving as executive director of the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs for the past 11 years under three different governors, House’s primary responsibility was to build partnerships and relationships beneficial for the Ute tribes in Southwest Colorado and about 48 other tribes that have some cultural connections to the state.
But he traces his education in building cross-cultural bridges way back to his boyhood in the 1980s.
House, 37, grew up on Montezuma County Road G in McElmo Canyon, close to his roots with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, in a house where the road transitions from mesa to canyon and sunsets light up sandstone formations.
He also grew up as son of Ernest House Sr., who served four terms as Ute Mountain Ute tribal chairman. As son of the longtime tribal leader, he grew up apprenticing in governmental relations.
“My dad took me along to all the meetings, water policy, health care, economic development. At the time I didn’t really appreciate what I was learning. Now, it’s amazing how it’s all come back. I couldn’t have learned from anyone better,” House said.
He remembers his father and grandfather, Thomas House, discussing the Dolores Water Project, which led to the creation of McPhee Reservoir. He remembers their discussions about the benefits a stable source of water would bring to Towaoc, where as late as the 1980s, many houses lacked running water.
He remembers discussions his father had with Leonard Burch about the economic importance of Ute water rights – and ensuring those rights would become tangible, useful realities through the Animas-La Plata Project for the Southern Utes and the Dolores project for the Ute Mountain Utes.
“What my father stood for was better relationships with Cortez, the county, the state, the federal government. He was an advocate not only for the tribe and its culture but for its success. For him, your main focus always had to be for the health and sustainability of the community,” House said.
Perhaps the most important benefit House says he took away from his boyhood travels with his father was “an ability to be comfortable in different worlds.”
Governmental meetings with their own mores, manners and protocols, no matter how Byzantine and remote from his life growing up in McElmo Canyon, are not an alien world to House. That familiarity with intergovernmental relations, he said, fosters within him a certain psychological ease and confidence that he would otherwise lack.
It was that confidence to move in two worlds that House said helped him in the successful Colorado implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a piece of legislation that many feared would destroy collections in museums across the country.
House said in 2007, History Colorado and the Commission of Indian Affairs involved the two Ute tribes and 48 other tribes from across the country that have some roots in Colorado to work on procedures to follow to protect Native American graves, cultural sites and unidentified human remains.
“There had been attempts to put procedures in place before, but they always failed,” House said. “I think the reason this succeeded is because it was tribally driven. The tribes asked tough, legitimate questions, and in the end, we ended up with better relationships. It became a tool based on respect that in this case built better relationships between museums and tribes.
The archaeological record, House notes, indicates Ute settlements in Colorado go back at least 10,000 years, and for the last 200 years, Ute culture has been under assault beginning with the Western expansion of the United States.
In the digital age, House said, it has become even more vital to protect the Ute culture, traditions and language in the face of technological advances that hold both dangers and opportunities for protecting and nurturing the Ute way of life.
“We have a new generation in which the language and traditions are being lost. We need to balance today’s technology with Ute culture and language. It’s a struggle, but it would be very detrimental to lose our culture, traditions and language,” he said.
House, who was elected chairman of the Fort Lewis College Board of Trustees in December, sees the position as an ideal spot for him to build bridges between the Utes and other Native American tribes with the world beyond their ancestral homelands in the Four Corners.
“There’s this black-and-white era view that Native American culture is fading away and vanishing. But it’s not true,” he said. “We’re here. We’ve always been here. And you can be a scientist, a lawyer or an educator and still honor your native culture and traditions, and I think FLC is an important and vital place to make that happen.”
Steven Short, the previous chairman of the FLC Board of Trustees, described House as “balanced” and “diplomatic,” attributes he sees as coming from House’s experience in both Native American communities and the world outside Indian Country.
Another strength House brings to the board, Short said, is his familiarity with state government and officials in Denver.
“His knowledge of the Legislature and how it works and his political connections are much larger than other trustees have,” Short said. “His work with the Legislature and his relationship with state officials in Denver give the Board of Trustees a perspective we wouldn’t have.”
In September, House resigned as leader of the Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs and became a senior policy director with the Keystone Policy Center, a think tank that seeks to find shared solutions to contentious problems in agriculture, education, energy and public health issues.
The job will not require a move for House, who now lives in Aurora with his wife, Jennette, and their two children, daughter, Colbie, 8, and son, Elijah, 6.
At Keystone, House said his job building relationships between different communities, particularly fostering partnerships among tribal and nontribal communities, will continue.
“For the past 11 years, I was trying to bring different perspectives to the table, and that’s what I’ll continue to do at Keystone,” he said.
His initial project with Keystone will be to bring tribal voices into conversations with mining, oil and pipeline companies, and the extractive industries, with the idea of creating beneficial partnerships that honor Native American lands and allow earlier and more effective input from tribes on future oil and gas projects.
The whole idea, he said, is to address issues such as those that arose between Native American tribes and the oil and gas industry in the proposed building of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“We want to get ahead of systems that are outdated and that need a tribal perspective, and when we see more of that perspective, we can look at how policies can be changed for the better for everybody,” House said.
parmijo@durangoherald.com
An earlier version of this story misspelled Ernest House Jr.’s first name in a headline. The error was made in editing.
