ICT interview with Assistant Secretary Kevin Washburn of BIA

In our first interview back in October 2012, you said you were skeptical about taking this job and you described it as “one of the hardest jobs in government.” Do you have any regrets that you took it and has it turned out to be one of the hardest jobs in government? Well, I didn’t have much information to go on, but it certainly is a difficult job. It’s largely because of having to be an expert in everything all the time – just think of the range of the questions you’ll ask. Coming from an academic background, you’re not supposed to be opining about things if you're not an expert in that subject. Now I’m asked all kinds of questions that I know just a little bit about because I have to skim across the surface of so many subjects. So, honestly, sometimes what gets me smarter on an issue is when a reporter is asking questions because my first impression is, “I didn’t even know about that issue, let’s dig into it.” So you all play a role in educating me and every other decision-maker in Washington in that respect.

Thank you . . . You've been on the job two years now – is it becoming harder?

It’s a tough job. I think that I was at first overwhelmed and then I kind of thought I knew what I was doing, and now I really have a sense of it. But it’s brutal. Poverty is such an overarching problem and so is crime. The daily things that I learn about are just agonizing. Recently, a tribal council member came in from a reservation where six babies had been born in his district in the space of two weeks, all of whom had alcohol or drugs in their bloodstreams. So what that means – and now I know to think about what the broader question is – you have to find six different pairs of foster parents to take each one of those kids and we don’t have six healthy families that each can absorb an infant all in the space of a two-week period. And so daily, I hear about something fairly tragic that we aren’t addressing very well, and so those are the kinds of things that make it overwhelming.

What do you think the most important issues are?

It’ll be easier for me to answer that question after I've been six or 12 months out of the job when I’ll have a little bit of distance from it. Right now it seems like we run from one crisis to the next and we’re so understaffed and overloaded and have such a broad range of issues.

How do you feel personally when you hear about these six babies and how do you deal with it as the head of the BIA?

Well, most tribes deal with poverty and we've all come from those communities so we kind of have a sense of it. Just multiply it by 566 and you know how much we hear about and we learn about. I was joking with somebody at the State Department just recently: You know, the Secretary of State John Kerry has only 180-odd countries that he maintains relations with and I've got 566 nations and a much smaller budget and a much smaller staff and fewer offices and such. The guy that I was talking to said something like, ‘Well, we’re in the news every day, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan…’ No one pays attention to Indian country – that kind of attitude. But what we do affects a lot of people too. I didn’t take umbrage particularly. It just kind of saddened me a bit that we are somewhat invisible …