Mercier reflects on two decades of service

 

By Nicole Montesano

Smoke Signals staff writer

While Tribal member Chris Mercier is proud of his accomplishments after serving Tribal Council for more than two decades, he said it’s time for a break and a change of focus.

Now 51, Mercier began serving on Tribal Council at the age of 29, in 2004. He served from 2004 to 2013 and then 2014 to 2026, after a one-year break to attend law school.

Mercier did not run for re-election last summer, instead nominating Tribal member Valeria Atanacio, who was elected to her first term on council.

“It’s not for everyone,” he said. “But it’s an ideal job, just in that it’s not the same every day. The issues  facing the Tribe, the challenges for you if you’re a council member, they change every year. I like the challenge and the challenges we had to deal with while on Tribal Council. And I don’t think any of my co-workers hated me when I was leaving. I feel like I had good relationships with my co-workers.”

Mercier is not ruling out running again in the future. But for now, he wants some time to relax, to focus on less weighty matters and work on personal projects instead.

Representing the Tribe means taking on weighty issues on behalf of a large, diverse Tribe that often doesn’t agree on how to address them. Some of those can be painful.

But Mercier said he loved the job.

“I’m proud that we banned disenrollment through a constitutional amendment, proud that we finally addressed the 1999 amendment, even though the solution has not been to everybody’s liking,” he said, regarding the current enrollment procedures under lineal descent. “I don’t know that there was a solution to that that was going to be to everybody’s liking.”

During his time on Tribal Council, Mercier said he is proud of the relationships that were developed and what he stood for when elected hadn’t changed.

“I think I’m just proud that I got to do this job for 21 years, and hopefully, I’ll get to do it again sometime in the future,” he said. “I regret that I didn’t step aside sooner. Burnout was probably the driving force behind my decision to step aside and  I … should have stepped aside three years ago. I don’t know if my last three years were my best years as a Tribal Council member.”

Mercier said he “would have liked to see more constitutional amendments with our Tribe, because I don’t know that our constitution reflects a lot of the issues that our Tribal government has to deal with. I regret not finding a better way to get more issues out to a vote of our people. That’s in our constitution; it’s housed in language that is completely unrealistic to exercise. I regret not finding an easier way for our members to help guide major decisions.”

Mercier said that it was one of the greatest challenges of the job.

“Toward the end, we did have some successful constitutional amendments, but we had a lot of constitutional amendments that failed and that’s always dispiriting and draining. … Especially when it came to enrollment; that was always just frustrating because a lot of our constitutional amendments on enrollment, I feel like misinformation was weaponized.”

Despite his frustrations, he said, “I still think we’re a model Tribal government, in terms of transparency and communication to our members.”

Listen to "Former Tribal Council member Chris Mercier reflects on 21 years of service" on Spreaker.

Mercier said there are several things he hopes Tribal Council will address.

“I think we offered some things that we quit offering, like the lifestyle grants, the Tribal loans,” he said. “I think no matter what, there are still more services that we can offer our Tribal members, and I’m hoping that that gets put back on the Tribal Council’s radar, because especially the lifestyle grants and the loans, they’re obviously really popular, because the funding for them dried up so  quickly. So, finding a way that we can offer those services sustainably and consistently would be nice.”

In addition, he said, “I hope that we can continue to look at ways to improve communication with our Tribal members. Years ago, I think I had majority support for a Tribal radio station, probably an online radio station and it just never happened. I felt like support was lukewarm on it and I think that’s just the kind of thing that I hope Tribal Council will look at. … I’ve seen other Tribes that have radio stations, they have their own YouTube channels, I’ve seen a Tribe in Canada that has a channel that’s in their own language. I think there are tons of media options available and I think if we’re serious about informing our members and controlling the messaging as it gets out to the outside world, we need to start looking at other media options. We need to look at expanded media.”

Mercier said the Tribe also needs to continue exploring revenue options.

“I think we can’t rely on the casino forever and we have made multiple attempts at economic diversification and some have worked, some have worked quite well. … and then we’ve had some ideas that went nowhere,” he said. “Some ideas, some things we did went about as bad as they could go. Membership’s continuing to grow, especially because of the constitutional amendment, so we are going to want to look at additional sources of revenue. And knowing where to put your money, that was the challenge when I first got elected onto council and it’s still the challenge now.”

While taking a break from those challenges, Mercier said he wants to take time to address things he’s been putting off, from organizing to watching old movies, taking time to read and maybe doing some traveling.

“I have a lot of life organizing, a lot in possessions and a lot of stuff I’ve been wanting to do that has been put on the back burner,” he said. “Now is the time that I want to deal with a lot of it. I’ve had some deaths in my family lately and that’s made me realize how much you leave people to deal with, actually having to sort through all your stuff, but you also have to think how much stuff do I have that I don’t even look at or use or that I’ve completely forgotten about. So, I’ve already made a bunch of trips to Goodwill.”

In everyone’s lives, there are tasks or dreams that get filed under “someday” or “one of these days,” Mercier said.

 “Now that I’m in my 50s and I haven’t done some of this stuff, I realize that this is the time to do it,” he said. “The window of opportunity might have closed on some things … The longer you put some of this stuff off, the more your window to do it at all closes completely.”