Board of Directors
Carmen Lopez (Navajo)
Chairperson
Ms. Lopez serves as the Executive Director of College Horizons, Inc., a national educational non-profit based out of Pena Blanca, New Mexico. College Horizons supports the higher education of Native American students by providing pre-college (College Horizons) and pre-graduate (Graduate Horizons) summer programs open to American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian high school and college students/graduates from across the nation. Students are mentored and taught by a team of admissions officers and graduate faculty members, guidance counselors, educators, and partners to select colleges or graduate programs suitable to apply to. Students also complete essays, resumes, applications; receive interviewing skills and test-taking strategies; and financial aid/scholarship information. Mrs. Lopez is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and is from the Forest Lake area of Black Mesa, Arizona. She also grew up in Farmington, New Mexico. Mrs. Lopez is of the Bitter Water clan, her maternal grandfather’s clan is Many Goats and her paternal grandfather’s clan is Anglo.
Mrs. Lopez served for five years as the Executive Director of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) located in Cambridge, MA where she oversaw the operation of a university-wide Interfaculty Initiative which focused on Native American recruitment and student support; teaching and research; and community outreach. Mrs. Lopez also served as a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Committee on Ethnic Studies, The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, admissions reader for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master in Public Policy program, consultant to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and a reader and site visitor for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development’s Honoring Nations Program.
Mrs. Lopez received her B.A. in History modified with Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and her Masters in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Mary Trimble Norris (Oglala Lakota)
Board Secretary/Treasurer
Mary currently serves as the Executive Director of the American Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland California. AICRC is a major developer, provider and trainer of Indian foster care parents for American Indian children in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is a strong advocate for compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) by local and state social service agencies. Mary served for many years as the Deputy Director of California Indian Legal Services.
Gerald Sherman (Oglala Lakota)
Member-At-Large
President/CEO
Indian Land Capital Company
P.O. Box 45
Roscoe, MT 59071
Phone: 406-328-4622
Email: geralds@montana.net
Gerald Sherman, an Oglala Lakota, was raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the Lakota Fund, the first community development loan fund on the Pine Ridge Reservation and one of the first micro-enterprise loan funds in the U.S. Currently, Gerald serves as President and CEO of the Indian Land Capital Company, a national lending company that finances tribal governments to purchase alienated lands and fractionated ownership interests in trust lands. After leaving the Lakota Fund in 1990, Gerald began his banking career with Norwest Bank (now Wells Fargo Bank) where he worked as manager of a bank on the Lower Brule Reservation in South Dakota. He has also since worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and First Interstate BancSystem of Montana. Upon leaving banking, Gerald became the Program Officer for the Four Times Foundation, a foundation that provided equity capital to Indian entrepreneurs on select Indian reservations. Gerald Sherman is a member of the International Advisory Council of the Native Nations Institute (NNI) of the Udall Center at the University of Arizona, Tucson. NNI is affiliated with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, and provides training and consulting services to Indian Nations in executive leadership with a focus on “nation building.” He received his bachelor’s degree in business from Oglala Lakota College. Gerald lives on the Lazy E-L Ranch near Roscoe, Montana with his wife Jael and son Luke, where they operate a working cattle ranch and guest ranch.
Charles F. Sams III (Cocopah/Cayuse/Yankton)
Member-At-Large
Director, Tribal & Native Lands Program,
Trust for Public Land
4433 N.E. Holman Street
Portland, Oregon 97218
(503) 545-7668
Email chassams@yahoo.com
Charles Sams has an extensive background working to protect, conserve and enhance this nation’s endangered environmental resources. He currently serves as the National Director of the Tribal & Native Lands Program operated by the Trust for Public Lands. He works with native communities throughout the United States to reacquire and restore the health of their ancestral lands, and to help create native land bases that can serve as the foundation for greater economic self-sufficiency. Prior to working for the Trust for Public Land, Charles served as the Executive Director of the Columbia Slough Watershed Council whose mission is to foster actions that promise to protect, enhance, restore and revitalize watersheds, wet lands, wildlife species, streams and lakes located on the southern flood plain of the Columbia River. In the past, Charles served as the Executive Director of the Community Energy Project, and as the Executive Director of Earth Conservation Corps. In both positions, Charles led and supported the efforts of citizens, working together with a range of public and private organizations and agencies, to conserve and restore critical environmental resources. Charles is a member of the Cocopah Nation of Southwest Arizona with blood ties to the Cayuse, Yankton Sioux. From 1988 to 1995, he served this country as an Intelligence Specialist with the United States Navy.