Call for Presentations

You are invited to submit a proposal to share your experience and expertise with colleagues at the 2025 United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) Tribal Leaders Summit (Summit). Our goal is for people to experience educational, informative, inspirational, and entertaining, professional development while networking with other tribal leaders.

The Summit attracts around 1,000 attendees who represent tribal leadership, and federal and state partners, from North Dakota, the Great Plains, and Indian Country. UTTC students attend as part of their college curriculum to expose them to real time issues being addressed by tribal leadership. Year after year, the Summit has drawn a loyal following of participants eager to learn about innovative ideas, best practices, and relevant approaches in tribal leadership, governance, and sovereignty.

In 2025, the Tribal Leaders Summit will offer seven (8) Conference Tracks, each critical issues, but all interrelated to one another to include:

• Track 1: Economic Development
  Tribal leaders face unique challenges and opportunities concerning economic development. Proposals in this track should highlight emerging trends/ideas, best practices, and relevant approaches to economic development topics.
• Track 2: Physical, Mental, and Public Health
  This track covers all issues related to mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual, health of people. Proposals would include western or traditional medicine, as well as fusions of both.
• Track 3: Education
  Developing, implementing, and evaluating, activities and programs that address education programming. This includes all levels of education from early childhood through graduate school.
• Track 4: Governance
  Overseeing all aspects of tribal governance, negotiating with other governmental entities, taxation, founding documents, sovereignty and any other topics related to governance.
• Track 5: Criminal Justice
  This track covers all topics related to the field of criminal justice such as policing, law enforcement, and judicial topics.
• Track 6: Culture
  This track covers all topics related to the field of American Indian culture, language revitalization and language teaching models.
• Track 7: Social Justice
• This track covers core principles in our personal and professional lives that contribute to creating a more just and equitable society where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. The commitment to these principles requires ongoing education, self-reflection, and collective action to dismantle systemic injustices and create a more equitable future for all. 
• Track 8: Agriculture and Food Sovereignty
• This track covers the vast field of agriculture and food sovereignty with a specific focus on native and culturally important plants and animals.  This tract includes the expansive interactions of food systems such as trade, cooking, preservation, storytelling, education, and community.

Proposals for the 2025 Summit must link presentation content and learning objectives to one of the above tracks.

Proposals should include features such as:

• Leading-edge information and emerging trends.
• Practical strategies for improvement and innovation, and non-traditional approaches.
• “How to” best practices and case studies, including tangible implementation tool(s).
• Demonstration of measurable impacts and effective programming that can be replicated in tribal communities.

The UTTC Tribal Leaders Summit provides a powerful platform to network with 1,000+ current and upcoming tribal leaders from across the Great Plains region. Participants can share knowledge, lessons learned, and best practices, in a culturally based professional setting. As a not-for-profit entity, the UTTC Tribal Leaders Summit does not pay a speaking fee to presenters. Instead, all funds raised during events week go toward direct scholarships for students. We ask that presenters share their expertise in the spirit of furthering the professional development of their colleagues and contributing to the professionalism of current and future tribal leadership. In exchange, we offer presenters the following:

• Waived registration fee.
• Valuable experience presenting at one of the nation’s leading tribal leadership conferences.
• Networking opportunities with and visibility to 700+ conference attendees.
• Access to the Trade Show associated with the Tribal Leaders Summit.
• One complementary admission to the UTTC International Powwow.

 Each session will last 50 minutes, and we encourage you to leave time at the end for questions. 

The Conference always fills up fast so submit early! 

Contact Summit Chair with any questions.

Edwin Kitzes

Summit Chair

ekitzes@uttc.edu

(701) 221-1535