BCBSOK weaves Native culture into corporate culture

TULSA, Okla. – Today’s continually changing corporate culture can sometimes seem worlds away from Native American culture, focused on the preservation of traditions and tongues of distant ancestors. But as more Native Americans secure their place in a corporate atmosphere while maintaining their tribes’ values, a meeting between the worlds was inevitable.

Companies like BlueCross BlueShield of Oklahoma are stepping forward to meet those changes and add to the company’s sense of Native American identity for all employees and clients.

“This is the Oklahoma headquarters (of BCBSOK) so we really wanted it to have an Oklahoma personality, and that meant capturing elements from all the histories,” said Mercedes Millberry, communications consultant for BCBSOK.

Throughout the building, pieces of the state’s and region’s past are exhibited in displays on par with those you might find in museums. There’s the Route 66 display in the break room. There’s also art reflecting Oklahoma’s oil story on display throughout their downtown Tulsa headquarters located at 1400 S. Boston Avenue. In the ground floor lobby, where visitors wait to be met by a representative and employees must pass to enter the company credit union office, a multi-panel display joins the stories of three important aspects of Native culture: the Creek Nation Council Oak Tree in Tulsa, the Comanche code talkers of World War II and Oklahoma City’s annual Red Earth Native American Festival.

Images surround the informational panels sharing a piece of history and the present with everyone who stops to view them.

The overall art planning for the headquarters building was coordinated by the company’s facilities planning division, which worked with Art Dallas to acquire the art. But the planning had input by a local renovation team.

“We wanted people to be able to walk into the building and get a sense of who Oklahoma is based on what they saw,” Millberry said.

BCBSOK is a division of Health Care Service Company (which covers Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Illinois) and an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. The company has operated in the state for 72 years, making it Oklahoma’s oldest and largest private health care insurance provider. Today more than 600,000 residents are insured through the company. Across the state, BCBSOK employs about 1,000 people. Among that population are employees who identify themselves as part of an American Indian tribe. Other employees also claim to have some Native heritage in their background. For this reason, the Oklahoma office of the insurance conglomerate created a Native American resource group. It’s but one of the employee resource groups across BCBS, but it is the first to be Oklahoma-based and the first with a Native association.

In the group, Native employees come together in a professional environment to share activities and discussion of identity within the company, said Haley Downing, also a BCBSOK communications consultant.

Bert Marshall, president of BCBSOK, is Cherokee and the executive sponsor of the group, Downing said. He has helped to drive initiatives expressing cultural identities.

One of those initiatives is an art contest recently held for employees, who submitted original pieces of art inspired by their heritage or something personal to them.

Danielle Ward, an outcomes reporting analyst for the company for five years, won with a portrait she drew in colored pencil of Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux chief who resisted the U.S. Indian removal policies and defeated troops at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Ward and her family began piecing together their history after discovering her late grandmother was adopted and a full-blood Creek.

To Ward, the image of Sitting Bull has always been a powerful and influential image in her life. Her portrait will be framed and displayed in the building for visitors to ponder along with the main display on the ground floor. She says she is beyond pleased of the display and her company.

“It says so much,” Ward added. “I mean, we have such a huge support group for Native Americans.”

Why do Native employees or any other group of employees need to have the ear of their company? Happy workers, as the saying goes, are productive workers.

“I think anytime a workplace really is a true reflection of its employees, that comes across. Employees really feel included as part of the overall company, and know that ‘It’s not just a place I go every day from 8 to 5. It’s a place that cares for me and my history,’” Millberry said.

Of course, it’s also good for the clients and visitors.

“We are a local company and we want people to know that and remember we’re not some faceless corporation coming in from out of state. These are your neighbors and we’re working for your health and for ours.” Millberry.

BCBSOK continues with such programs as the Care Van program, in which it partners with recognized tribal governments to send vans into communities to immunize children at no cost to patients, but it’s also looking within the company to reach out to the Native American population.



Danielle Ward, Muscogee (Creek), is the BlueCross BlueShield of Oklahoma employee who won her company's Native art contest. Soon her portrait of Sitting Bull will hang with other Oklahoma and tribal-identified art at the company's headquarters in Tulsa.