When I started teaching in Browning, Mt, in 1961, Sylvia Ashton-Warner with her intense and scary ideas was very popular. She was teaching illiterate Maori kids with wild home lives, not unlike those on the rez. At the start of the day, she asked each kid what word they wanted to learn and printed it on a card for them to carry around. It was THEIR word and through the day they said it, copied it, reflected on what it meant. At the end of the day they took their word home and explained it to their folks. So what words were they? Murder. Knife. Skeleton. They read fast and hot, they wrote the same way, and Ashton-Warner was right there with them, urging them on. They cared.
So when my discussion class could hardly be persuaded to talk at all, much less reflect on how they interacted with each other, I asked them for their “word” topic. It was that the town police were beating them up. I knew this was true. One of the students had a bedroom window upstairs where she could see across the way to the jail. She witnessed the beatings. Her parents told her not to tell. I was keeping company with Bob Scriver, who was the city magistrate and he did indeed bawl out some city officers for beating drunks and kids, but the tribal cops had no restraint. At home they beat their wives. Everyone said, “Don’t get involved.”
So we began to talk about it and pretty soon there was a polite knock on the classroom door. It was the chief of police, who was also the head of the school board, and he was writing me a ticket for slander. So we went together to the superintendent’s office, who explained that the defense for slander was simply proving that it was true. If it was true, you could say it. Even if no one liked to hear it, if it was true, it was legal. I could prove it was true, so the case was not slander. After the cop left, the superintendent and I had a little talk about surviving in hostile territory.
Much, much later when I was off the rez, the tribe felt that children taken into custody were being abused because they were taken to jail with adults, so they set up a special safe house. The kids were not nice. Abuse does not make people nice. They treated the adult staff the same way they treated their abusers: cursing, hitting, taunting, provoking, etc. Soon the adult staff that was supposed to be protecting them was caught duct-taping them to chairs with bags over their heads to keep them from spitting. It takes a lot of personal security and confidence to withstand rage and revenge from kids.
In the Seventies when I returned to teaching, the kids were constantly indignant at adult behavior. They demanded that things change. One day they gathered in the library/auditorium and started a near-riot, shouting and overturning chairs but not harming the books. We had a brilliant counselor who was not afraid of kids and though they wouldn’t allow any other adults in the room, he was able to go in and talk it through.
When I briefly taught in a nearby white town not so long ago, there was a phalanx of athletic boys who had gotten out of hand. The idea was that I would somehow dominate them because of the fantasy that the rez was a tough place and since I had taught there, I could crack the whip. They WERE crazy and obscene and argumentative. I asked the librarian and the computer teacher what they thought was the secret to controlling these young men -- drunks, sexually active, “red-meat-eaters,” who consistently won games. The answer they gave me was “kill them.” They meant it.
Murder was not practical, so I went back to the Sylvia Ashton-Warner kind of approach, the walking in with the lions thing. These guys -- and some of the gals -- felt that the world was going to smash, that adults were hypocrites and abusers, the town was a pit, and etc. etc. As soon as they had permission to talk and it seemed as though I were listening, emotion came pouring out. One boy drew diagrams of it on the whiteboard.
Basically, they were neglected and abused. Not that they were starved or didn’t have clothes -- not those things. But that they were being used by an ignorant community that would abandon them as soon as they weren’t useful anymore. For me it was summed up by “extreme fighting” matches in back alleys that adults set up and attended for betting, no different from dog-fighting. These were mostly white kids, some with professional parents. So far as I know, disease was not a problem but injuries were, drugs were (steroids), alcohol was but no one thought so. Some of their behavior was criminal but there was no proof, no witnesses. Denial. Suppression. Force. Don’t even THINK about gay.
Bryon Farmer
So I wasn’t surprised at the reaction when over the weekend of North American Indian Days, Bryon Farmer said on Facebook that he was going to sponsor a float in the parade that would challenge the Tribal Council. The police walked into his family’s group meal on the camp grounds, and took him to jail. He was there four days. No float appeared. The best discussion I’ve found so far was at http://www.popehat.com/2013/07/22/bryon-farmer-of-the-blackfeet-tribe-jailed-for-talking-about-corruption-in-tribal-government/ quoted below.
How can such an ordinance — or any prosecution premised on it — stand, under the First Amendment? . . .
The United States has made gestures of contrition and correction, including a half-century effort to give surviving tribes sovereignty. That sovereignty includes jurisdiction over criminal charges against tribal members on tribal lands. [And now charges against whites on tribal lands.]
Does that mean that members of Native American tribes have no right to free speech? No — in theory. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 says that tribes can't "make or enforce any law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for a redress of grievances." But here's the rub: sovereignty also means that the tribes get to enforce that right. The Supreme Court has ruled that, in general, only tribal courts have the right to decide whether tribal practices comply with the Indian Civil Rights Act. Bryon Farmer and people like him can't sue in state or federal to invalidate Ordinance 67 – they have to rely on a tribal court, connected politically and culturally to the tribal council. Mr. Farmer could seek a writ of habeas corpus in federal court to get out of tribal custody, but that's a painfully slow process, one that allows the tribe to harass dissenters with short-term incarceration with effective impunity.
In the Sixties Bob would sentence someone to jail, the cops would take them there, and within an hour -- released by a relative on the tribal council -- they’d be back (still drunk) to argue about the case some more. Hard not to lose patience. The whole law and order concept needs a good airing, not just on the rez. IMHO the Cut Bank cop who pursued Shannon Augare onto the rez and then tried to reach into his car to take the keys was being overbearing and provocative. A different sort of drunk might have gotten so angry that he had to be tazed. By driving off, Augare DE-escalated. It was easy enough to serve him a ticket the next day. How the FBI figures into it is beyond me. More escalation.
The first rule of governing and restoring order -- much neglected these days -- is not to make a fool of yourself. Maybe we should hand out cards with that written on them.
Tribal Chairman Willie Sharp
Willie Sharp -- Senior Class of 1972
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