Remarks at White House American Indian and Alaska Native Business Council Meeting

Remarks at White House American Indian and Alaska Native Business Council Meeting

The following acting secretary speech was published by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Sept. 27, 2012. It is reproduced in full below.

Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank Remarks at White House American Indian and Alaska Native Business Council Meeting Thank you, Director Hinson. It’s great to be here with top business leaders from the many American Indian and Alaska Native communities across our nation.

I’d like to briefly introduce Dee Alexander, my senior adviser for Native American Affairs. Dee is from the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes. She played a major role in American Indian and Alaska Native policy at the Census Bureau.

More recently, she developed the Commerce Department’s new tribal consultation policy – the result of President Obama’s order to all federal agencies to establish such a policy.

Truly, the president gets it when it comes to Indian Country. As you may know, over the past three years: Back in 2008, our economy was spiraling downward. The financial system was inches away from a full collapse. Housing prices plummeted, as did the stock market. And employers were shedding 750,000 jobs a month.

Today, we’ve still got much more work to do, but because of the steps the president tookcombined with the hard work and resilience of businesses some of you operate, we’ve now had 30 straight months of job growth totaling 4.6 million new private-sector jobs.

Now, we can all agree that growth hasn’t been as fast as we’d like. It’s taking time to recover, unemploymemt has come down, but it’s still too high, and we still have headwinds like the Eurozone crisis and sporadic spikes in oil prices.

But despite these challenges, our economy has been growing and will continue to grow.

Our goal now is to accelerate this growth… to make sure that it translates into greater prosperity and opportunities for families in and from Indian Country… and to make sure that everyone who wants a job has a job.

I have been asked to highlight some examples of how our bureaus at the Commerce Department are doing this – and I’m happy to do so.

First, I should highlight the work of the Minority Business Development Agency, because they’ve been working aggressively to help Native-owned businesses.

So let me mention the work of a third bureau of the Commerce Department – the National Telecommunications and Information Administration – NTIA.

I’d be remiss not to mention that our partners across the Administration stand right there beside us.

As you may have heard, the 2010 Census at the Commerce Department was a success in many ways. It was on-time, under-budget and extremely accurate.

Put simply, we couldn’t have done that without the strong partnership and advocacy of leaders like you. You raised awareness and, as a result, 5.2 million people – 1.7% of the U.S. population – identified themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native, in whole or in part.

That was a staggering 27 percent jump from 2000.

Not only is that important to help us gain a better understanding of who we are as a country… … but it opens people’s eyes to the fact that the contributions from Indian Country not just to our economy – but also to our society and our culture overall – are much more powerful than perhaps many recognized.

So my commitment to all of you today is this: This administration will continue to listen closely to the leaders in and from Indian Country. And then we’ll take action as we have over the past 3 years.

To move forward, we know that we need to be smart about the policies that we enact in the public sector. But we also will need the ongoing hard work, entrepreneurship, and investment that our private sector has always provided – including that of the American Indian and Alaska Native business leaders in this room.

Your efforts are crucial if we are going to grow the economy at all levels – from our remote villages to our major cities.

So let’s make good choices now, and lay the foundation for stable, long-term growth that will bring more jobs and more prosperity throughout our diverse communities and across the U.S.

Thank you.

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce

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