BLACKFEET AMBIGUITY

People seem to hate ambiguity and yet the authors of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” suggest that what holds our attention is ambiguity.  Their example is the “Mona Lisa,” the famous portrait of a woman who may or may not be smiling.  They explain how the artist got the effect (mixing vagueness with precision) and how brains are riveted by the need to know, perhaps a quality related to the early hunter trying to decide whether to risk his last arrow on a shadowy form in the forest.  The daisy factor:  she loves me, she loves me not . . .  Sometimes knowing for sure will end the relationship.  No more mystery, no more attraction.  And yet the results of their data-scraping on porn websites reveal things we never thought about before.  

“Data scraping” is a way of making computer information accessible to human beings.

“Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using data structures  suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. . .

“. . . output displays intended for human consumption often change structure frequently. Humans can cope with this easily, but computer programs will often crash or produce incorrect results.”

TEDTalks have noticed this technique.  Quid, for instance, demonstrates its program for diagramming “scraping” which does not result in tables of figures, but rather in colored, moving, clusters of relationships -- rhizome-style -- that are easily understood and include the factor of time.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKZCa_ejbfg

Looking at the welfare of nations, the progress of war, and other difficult to understand complexes in this way is a kind of narrative -- a story.  In fact, the best writers and readers see stories in this way.  Structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstruction movements of thought would be far more appealing if they were diagrammed so vividly and maybe someone will see the value in that.

So here’s what a team did with the problem of understanding modern guerrilla warfare in the Middle East, skirmishes here and there with very mixed results in terms of fatalities.  First they accumulated data, then they decided on a couple of factors which they graphed.  This is quoted from the transcript of Sean Gourley’s TED talk on war.  It’s on his website. (http://seangourley.com)

And the same pattern emerged in each conflict. This wasn't supposed to happen. These are different wars, with different religious factions, different political factions, and different socioeconomic problems. And yet the fundamental patterns underlying them are the same. . .   And what we really found was that alpha [the crucial factor in their formula], if we think about it, is the organizational structure of the insurgency. Alpha is the distribution of the sizes of attacks, which is really the distribution of the group strength carrying out the attacks. So we look at a process of group dynamics: coalescence and fragmentation, groups coming together, groups breaking apart.

Looked at over time and correlated with other factors, maybe from outside or maybe with developments inside the countries, it was possible to see what made change.  Not that it was always possible to predict what the forces would change.  In Iraq the “surge” at first produced a consolidation of the guerrilla groups, and then -- as the surge continued -- the groups flew apart again.  Gourley explains this in many contexts. 

The issue I want to think about is the Blackfeet Reservation.  This next week is “Days of the Blackfeet” at Blackfeet Community College and I hope to attend as an observer and data gatherer -- not that I’ll be able to produce a TED talk, but that at least maybe we can suggest ways around the same old cliches.  Maybe we can be Independent Diplomats or at least a kind of Public Intellectuals.  (Check out Carne Ross.  http://www.carneross.com)  Maybe the sessions will be the source of some good stories that show, Ross says,  “The few can never make decisions for the many.”  

Jack Gladstone

Darrell Kipp

Rosalyn LaPier

Lila Evans

Shannon Augare

Forrestina Little Dog

Willie Sharp (Tribal Chair)

Barack Obama and Eloise Cobell

The struggle to understand can be dignified and made something to respect instead of the sneering that comes from the surrounding white villages who don’t attend their own town council meetings because they cannot tolerate the ambiguity of their own situations.  On and off the rez we most often are given the information we need in spread sheets, rigid columns of numbers in categories thought up by some “quant” head with a pointy database.  IF you can get info!  Where does one access the raw figures for health, education, housing, crime, food distribution, income, transportation and so on?  Bureaucrats are reluctant to release them, partly because the numbers are often sought with the intent to use them as hostile evidence and partly because they really aren’t recorded.  They represent funding so it is an advantage to manipulate them.  By now much info is on computer and therefore could be found by a data-scraping program in quite a vivid way.

I often reflect that working with data is not unlike beading: small elements, carefully placed, finally forming a pattern, an image.  If I were a high school rez kid with oodles of neurons just waiting to be engaged, I would learn a data-scraping program, the kind with colors and movement, and put it to work.  This is what it means to be a modern hunter/gatherer.  If I were a manager of a government agency, I would do my best to learn how these programs operate and who can contract to deliver them.  

But I would not JUST data scrape.  It has to be put into context, weighed in terms of human values, which is what the traditional stories do.   So far, commercial companies are using data scraping to discover “world-shaking” issues like what kind of candy bar would sell best.  A good humanities education would make this laughable when you could use the technique to discover which children were getting enough to eat.  

Geography would point out that each of the rez communities has a character of its own that comes from where it is (the capital, the three resort towns, the two more traditional towns, the community on the flats, the “long towns” along the rivers, the towns the railroad built and then abandoned) and their unique history.  People move themselves into the community where they fit.  Some communities (Moccasin Flats, Robare, Palookaville) are so vivid in memory that they continue to exist in our minds long after their physical traces are gone.  Individual buildings are the same.  In my mind are many ghosts of structures no longer there.  

What if one of these programs could trace the life-paths of tribal members as they went from one place to another, even to Europe or China, and linked them to time so that we could see that they went to Seattle in wartime, went to the various government boarding schools, went into the military, moved off the rez to find jobs -- what would the moving beads reveal?   What would it show if intertribal marriage were put into a program?  Or the progress of fractionation, both people and land?

This is not an argument for ending ambiguity.  Rather it is a way of muddling things further so that we can leave the same old assumptions behind and find new ways.  What is causing dissenting groups to form and disperse over time?  What conditions would give them effective voices?  What are the effects they have on our personal lives?

Chief Mountain and the North Sentinels