To Our Relatives, Friends, and Partners,
On behalf of Blue Stone Strategy Partners, I want to thank Indian Country for your trust and support. We have been honored to assist so many Nations over the last twenty years. It is our privilege to be a Trusted Resource and to continue focusing on creating solutions and successes for Tribal Nations!
Let me start with where this began for me. In 2007, I reached my term limit as Chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation in Camp Verde, Arizona. I served two terms, and I left office knowing exactly what Tribal leadership asks of a person. You carry the hopes and challenges of your Tribal citizens. You carry decisions that will outlast your term. And you carry the daily responsibility of protecting your Nation’s Sovereignty.
I also knew what it felt like to carry that weight. Too many Tribal Leaders were being handed reports and recommendations by people who had never been in Tribal communities, and who did not fully understand the complexity of modern Tribal Nations. I did not leave office wanting to step away from Indian Country. I left office with a goal of building an organization that would stand with Tribal Leaders and clearly support the implementation of their Priorities.
Our Vice Chairman, John Mooers and I founded Blue Stone because Indian Country needed a partner that understood Tribal government from the inside, respected every Nation’s culture and right to set its own course, and would stay in the room until the work was done. Tribal Leaders needed a partner that would help address their modern organizational and economic challenges and provide proven methods for working through them with a business as well as cultural lens.
Our name comes from a teaching I grew up with. In our Apache culture, the Blue Stone is a protection stone. It is an important tool, used to protect our lifeways, our spirituality, our values, and our traditions. When we named this firm, we made a promise. Our role has always been to support Tribes and Tribal Leaders as they protect their sovereignty, protect their culture, and protect their future, and to help them build a vision and plan that is their own.
Twenty years later, Blue Stone completed more than 1,000 projects and worked with over 250 Tribal Nations. Our team has sat in council chambers, community halls, ceremonials, and job-site trailers across the country. Every one of those partnerships began the same way: a Sovereign Nation deciding what its future should look like and then taking action to build it.
Blue Stone’s success has never been separated from the success of our Tribal Clients; it is tied to it. When a Tribe opens a clinic that brings care closer to home, we are stronger for it. When a Tribe diversifies its economy, builds or acquires businesses, trains its own Tribal member workforce, or passes a governance reform its citizens asked for, we are stronger for that too. Blue Stone measures its success by the progress of our Tribal Partners. We always have.
Some of the steps we took together were big: a groundbreaking, a ribbon-cutting, a first payroll, a new Tribal tax ordinance. Others were quieter. A hard conversation in a work session that finally brought a leadership team onto the same page. A Tribal Council that walked out of a planning session with one Clear Vision instead of five. Those moments are the ones I carry with me, because that is where the real work of sovereignty happens. It is the moment the open hand becomes the clenched fist of determination.
Back home in the Verde Valley, the cottonwoods along the Verde River have been through floods, drought, and generations of change. They hold because their roots run deep, and because they grow in their own place, in their own way. That is what I have been honored to see firsthand with Tribal Nations for twenty years. No two journeys look alike, but every one of them needs a clear path and accountability. The greatest honor of my career to date has been watching Tribal Nations express their sovereignty on their own terms, and I am humbled that Indian Country has continued to trust Blue Stone to walk parts of that path alongside them.
To our Tribal Partners, past and present: thank you. You made this firm what it is. You taught our team, you pushed us, and you trusted us to be a resource. And you have helped us become a strong partner in protecting and supporting Indian Country to this very day.
To the Tribal Leaders who opened your doors to us when we were new and unproven: I have not forgotten, and I never will.
To the Nations we have not met yet, or who may not know how Blue Stone can support you: we are ready, willing, and able to support you.
I am hopeful that Blue Stone Strategy Partners will continue to grow with the same respect, commitment, and caring that guided our first twenty years. We will keep getting stronger and clearing the path forward, side by side, supporting the sovereignty and Lifeways of Tribal communities, always with protection at the center.
Ahe’he’,
Jamie Fullmer
Chairman, Blue Stone Strategy Partners