It took more than two years of conversations with Minnesota's eleven tribes and five University of Minnesota campuses to produce a draft update of the Board of Regents Policy: American Indian Advisory Boards for the University of Minnesota system.
And while it's still in the system (slated for discussion in September and passage in October), one of the policy's chief architects, Tadd Johnson, hopes it results in the inclusion of a representative from each of the Minnesota tribal nations on the Advisory Board.
Underlying that is a message Johnson has been hammering away at for decades: there are three kinds of sovereignty in America: federal, state and tribal.