Napkin Proposal with Carol Davis

So I called the stewardess over and I said I need some something to write but so she brings me this stack of she had no papers stack of napkins in the pen and I start writing and that’s that was the first proposal that we wrote and I sitting there and I was thinking who are we who are we were the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Singh that’s and now was I never written a proposal in my life never even seen one other than knowing that I was working under a program or there had been a proposal written so I knew that much I knew our data because of some of the information that I had shared and got new up so I just started you have a need how do you know you have a need so I wrote all the things down that were you know not having anybody with college degrees and whatever and then how do you know you can make this mean so I thought you know what if we had done a survey we could say that we do have students that are ready to attend so I started to think of all the people that I thought would register if Y if I said 90 so I wrote just about this fictitious survey that we had done there would be 90 people that were ready to register and then I thought the survey is on file with the Turtle Mountain band of chippewa I thought their filing system they were today they’d figure well and then how will we know when we’re successful okay so then we you know and I just I it was a practical thing and I didn’t write it from the standpoint of ever having written a proposal in my life but I just use common sense to write it when we landed and I think we went to Bismarck and after this mark we had to drive home from there but I had the first draft done the whole thing was done except for the budget and so we when I when I got home then I called Dave Gibb and he said they would do their proposal and we had to find a college that was willing to work with us to certify our credits so I immediately called Bottineau rotteness said we can’t do it because the State Board of Higher in passed a law that says that they State Board of Higher Ed passed a law that said they would not create any more colleges so I called the State Board of Higher Ed and got us into a meeting in Linn and I went to my not to this to this meeting of the State Board of Higher Ed they put us last on the agenda offered us to go drink with them in the bar we should know we know we just sat there and finally about midnight they invited us in into the meeting and I think we’re at the Holiday Inn and we were downstairs before their meeting room was and anyway we went into this to this meeting and one of the first things they said was we’ve decided that we would like to give you give you a college that’s in existence and you guys can create a tribal college there and we said no and I later when I met with the State Board of Higher Ed probably ten years later I told him that was a big mistake because we should have taken you up on that sold the buildings and used the money to start our colleges but what we told him that no that we had tried that and that was the reason we wanted to create tribal colleges on the reservations because our students don’t want to leave the reservation and so that was not what we wanted to do then we got into this big discussion about what to call us and so I Lin and I just backed away from the podium said call us anything you want but just a surest that’s bot no can certify our credits and so they ended up calling us the enrichment center Turtle Mountain enrichment center and so we went for a couple of years as an enrichment center Carly probably told you about that but so that was that was kind of the beginnings of the tribal college