Community members discuss Red Lake constitutional reform

BEMIDJI—Red Lake's Constitutional Reform Committee received ideas and feedback from the public Thursday during a community meeting that focused largely on separation of power.

Justin Beaulieu, a member of the committee who led the meeting, emphasized that members of the Red Lake Nation can make the Red Lake Constitution anything they want it to be. The committee takes the position that Red Lake needs an updated constitution, rather than the one the tribe adopted almost 80 years ago in order to be recognized as sovereign by the United States, according to the committee's website.

"In ours it kind of just says, here's your government and we're going to put all the decision-making power at the top," Beaulieu said. "The reason the United States government did that...they used it to centralize power discussions, those power dynamics, so they could go and get 10 or 12 people at a tribe...to agree to do something versus trying to get a whole collective nation, a tribal nation, to do something."

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