VALIER GROWTH PLAN PERSONAL COMMENTS

LET’S LOOK AT THIS “VALIER GROWTH” FROM THE OTHER END.  WHAT IS THE CARRYING CAPACITY FOR THIS LOCATION?  WHAT ARE THE REASONS FOR LIVING HERE?

1. Born here: historic immigration in boom times.
2. Local family ties, sometimes the need to support older family members
3. Grain farming, some of it on dry land where the only source of family water is a cistern filled from Valier wells.  Other farming entwined with the irrigation business: Pondera Canal Company which manages the impoundment that is Lake Francis, the feeder system that originates at Swift Dam and all the ditches.  This is the main reason for the existence of Valier.
4.   Businesses in support of grain farming:  equipment sales and maintenance, chemicals, the elevator and railroad, trucking, quality monitoring, storage.
5. Livestock in much variation:  organic free-range pigs, pig battery raising (Hutterite), traditional grazing livestock, cow-calf pairs, steer fattening.
6.   Businesses in support of livestock:  supplies and equipment, custom butcher, veterinarian, sorting and shipping corrals, horse activities like rodeo, brand inspection, predator control, feeds (alfalfa, pelletizing)
7. Computer technicians and wireless service
8. Infrastructure managers:  electrical, gas, water, sewage systems plus the associated bookkeeping; streets and alleys.  Trash and recycling.  Nothing to do with internet or telephone.
9. Interface with Hutterite colonies.  (Vegetable raising, chickens, eggs)
10.   Interface with the reservation.
11.   Small businesses like Pony Expressions, Medicine River Gallery, Kneads for Knots, hairdressers, the Panther, the motel, the green house, the counseling service
12.   Crafts and arts people:  painters, jewelry, writers, quilters, wood carvers, leatherworkers.  This is a slower, quieter place where one can work peacefully.  Most people are doing these things as supplements to other income.
13.   The library
14.   The Clinic and home support for the ill and aged
15.   Senior citizen meals
16.   Several thriving churches, two struggling.  No resident ministers.
17.   Various kind of law enforcement officers.
18.   The shooting range.  Are these law enforcement people using it?
19.   Gravel and excavation
20.   Highway maintenance

IF WE ADD UP ALL THESE JOBS, HOW MANY ARE THERE?  HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE COMMUTING INTO VALIER TO WORK?  HOW MANY ARE COMMUTING OUT?   

WHAT REASONS DISCOURAGE PEOPLE FROM LIVING HERE? 

•   Weather
•   Distance
• Rising expectations for housing.  Three times now I’ve known of prospective school superintendents who refused to come to Heart Butte or in Valier because there was NO house they considered suitable.  Twice this was resolved by the school supplying a manufactured home.  This was enmeshed with the conviction that equity in a house was a major source of family wealth.  This may have changed drastically.
• All infrastructure is aged, which means both the old breaking down and not pushing ahead to the new galloping technology.  We’ve barely disposed of the Big Dishes and cable TV though people have long moved on to the small “pizza pan” receivers or internet streaming.  We have yet to built the first cell tower for cell phones (smart phones have just arrived in Montana anyway) and now there is news about tiny cell gizmos that will replace the towers.
• Shortage of young volunteers to be EMT’s and fire fighters.
• No bus or other sort of support for non-drivers in order to access larger towns or even the national railroad, bus and air networks.   The Senior Surrey didn’t get enough business to continue because people rely on family and friends informally.  No one has begun a private chauffeur service, probably because of insurance.
• No laundromat.  Some prob -- most people have washing machines.
•  Xenophobia:  I’m being nice and not saying “racism.”  The other side of it is unjustified esteem for outsiders who purport to be expert, rich, etc.  High school cues, people.
•  Locals are saying they love the schools and feel they are excellent.  I have doubts.  I see the loss of many long-time stable teachers. 
•   No one is addressing the prevention of cancer and diabetes in this community.
•   Thinking of jobs in terms of a payroll instead of a small entrepreneurial business, possibly online.
•   Balky distributors:  Curry’s has to struggle to make them keep delivering bread and produce because we don’t buy enough to make it “worth their while.”  Yet we are prevented by state health rules from running our own bakery or even a canning business or fancy cakes.
•   Personal jealousies and feuds.  Oh, boy.

ATTITUDES THAT SLOW US DOWN

1. The idea that one can live in a rural place with every amenity available in a major city.  (There is no major city in Montana anyway.  Calgary is the closest, but the border is a hindrance now.)
2.   Passivity: the idea that things should be managed and supplied by someone else.
3.   Lack of savvy about how things work, who should do what, self-reliance.
4.   Out-sourcing to “consultants”  (Sorry, guys.)  The greatest value in such studies as this growth plan is realizations on the part of the investigators.
5.   Ancestor worship.
6.   Lack of awareness of planetary issues, particularly the impact of China; the changing weather; planetary pollution; natural resource exhaustion.
7.   Assumptions about the abilities of local residents.  There’s more talent here than the various committees seem to realize.
8.   Over-obedience to laws.  (Surprised?  It’s what Jesus called “jot and tittle” morality instead of looking at the spirit.)

WHAT INFORMATION DO WE NEED?

1. What is the carrying capacity of the present grain industry?
2.   Likewise, how many livestock ranchers can this area support?
3.   What sort of value-adding or supporting businesses could be added?  I suspect most will be related to distribution, pulling back from the major corporate systems like Cargill or whatever meat buyers are here.  Do we know who they are?  How many people are working on contract and how many have developed specialty markets?
4.   What has been the impact of the military for good or bad  in a time of constant foreign “interventions?”  How many youngsters join?  Is their training helpful after they leave?
5.   How many houses are currently for sale?  Has anyone inquired into what the no doubt assorted reasons might be?
6.   There was some interest in the recent meeting about how good the match is between CRP (being paid not to grow a crop) and the productivity of the land (CRP was supposed to apply to land too sandy, alkaline, or whatever).
7.  What would oil or coal development mean to Valier? 

There’s a peculiar local (peculiar but not uncommon) dynamic in which people who already have lived here a while think they know everything but, more than that, really resent outsiders knowing things.  (I remember the silence in the room when someone sneered,  “What kind of words are “Ponoka” and “Ptau” anyway?  Why don’t we just rename those streets?”   I said,  “They’re Blackfeet words.  Ponoka means elk.  Ptau -- usually spelled Peta -- means eagle.  Historic stuff.”  A strange mix of embarrassment, resentment, and realization.  (Same thing in Heart Butte when a white teacher there demanded to know what the heck a “Calf Boss Rib” was.  It’s the name of a prominent family.  It’s also the most desirable meat possible: taken from the ribs that have a sticking-up knob that forms the hump on the shoulders of the animal.)

Alongside that, there is a kind of crushing, deeply denied pressure to make this town work because of fears survival would not be possible elsewhere.  (Saying this will anger some.  It’s also true on the rez.)  The result of both emotions (they are NOT rational) is paralysis, the inability to think, to generate options, to use outsider expertise without being dependent on it.  

I do not think that building nice houses in the expectation that if one does that, nice occupants will come, is effective.   This opinion is a starting point for discussion and action, NOT reason to shut down.

LEAD, FOLLOW OR GET OUT OF THE WAY

A UUA district exec contacted me unexpectedly and asked me about Leadership School. Little did he know what he was tapping into. I will spare you the most of it, partly because of discretion and partly because of not wanting to scare any horses. I didn’t even mention “Bronze Inside and Out,” which is the solid decade of extreme experience here on the Blackfeet Reservation that made me into a person who can understand Tim Barrus a lot easier than I can understand a District Exec even after seminary. It also made such phenomena as leadership school, seminary, and clinical pastoral education entirely different for me than they were for the twenty-something middle-class young men for whom they were designed. If that sounds patronizing -- well, okay. That District Exec sounded patronizing to me. He always has since he was an upperclass student at my seminary, part of the group who invited my class over in pairs (there were only six of us) and let us know we were entirely deficient. I vividly remember the cockroaches roaming the walls of the seminary housing.

Anyway, this is about UU leadership school and has nothing at all to do with seminary except that it’s what got me so excited about the ministry in the first place. It was 1975, I was two years away from Montana, newly promoted to Education Coordinator of Multnomah County Animal Control, working on a degree in clinical psychology at Portland State University (having serious doubts, since I wanted to prepare for psychotherapy and they thought they were creating social workers), and thinking I should find a church. I found First Unitarian in Portland. Pretty soon I was becoming active and was asked if I’d like to go to Leadership School. I had no idea what it was.

Unknown to me at the time, the ministry had sort of drifted into being landed gentry, patriarchs who were expected to control and provide everything. The rest of us just organized tea parties and fed the animals. Peter Raible, minister in Seattle; Rod Stewart, Pacific Northwest District Exec; and Ord Elliott, Organizational Development guy working with corporations; plus a bit of help from the Alban Institute, which tries to keep churches keep their heads on straight, came up with the idea of this Leadership School. The principle was to empower laypeople to take some control and do some renewing. Too many thought, as I did, that belonging to a church meant showing up on Sunday morning to occupy a pew. It was sort of church Headstart.

You didn’t sign up on your own. Your church had to send you. First of all, you had to be a serious congregation member -- not some fad cruiser -- and second, you had to be sturdy enough to withstand the emotional pressures, though they didn’t tell us that. Myself, I was terrified. But then, so was the veteran and sturdy woman who drove us up to Fort Worden, an ascetic but glorious conference center in old barracks from WWII, overlooking the mouth of Puget Sound.

When I was a kid, I never went to camp. Our family did everything as a group, including tent-camping across the country. My primary school experience was bad: I wasn’t just ostracized, I was persecuted by my classmates. No idea why. My teachers wrote on my grade cards, “Mary cries too much.” By high school I’d learned to be a little crazy and never to get straight A’s. In college I’d attached myself to a little group. Etc. I didn’t know what kind of strategy to use at Leadership School. I decided to just go with “what you see is what you get.”

I’ve written about the Ingathering service on 10/4/08. That helped quite a lot. Also a kind older couple took me under their wing, though I was 36 and working the streets of Portland. Later on, when we were playing the game called “Win As Much as You Can” and I was partnered with these gentle people who so believed in cooperatives (they were Canadian), which meant that things were safe but a little boring, I turned provocateur and double-crossed them for the sake of the “profit.” Not only were they as reproachful and sad as though I’d just stolen their car, everyone else shunned me for the rest of the day! That day I ate in solitary but defiant splendor.

In another game, where everyone was standing in a big room and asked to choose partners, a woman crashed in tears because no one chose her. Evidently this was the story of her life. The facilitator of the exercise, a therapist as well as a minister, had everyone stand where they were while he gently worked us all through this emotional event. How was EACH of us feeling? What ARE the dynamics that cause some to be chosen and not others? And then the bottom line was empowering this woman. “You don’t have to wait to be chosen. YOU choose. Go choose someone right now! I’ll take the person who’s left over.” Then she wanted to choose HIM, because he was safe and sympathetic, which he pointed out.

It was like that. There was a game. Sometimes it was just a game and sometimes it blew up -- then we learned more.

At the heart of the structure of the experience were "strands." Also, a principle: learn by doing. For the most part, experts didn't lecture. Small groups of participants mastered one point and then DEMONSTRATED it to the others.

1. One strand was worship. Each day began with worship and each group was assigned a different "style": traditional, experimental, etc. An outside circle of women had been asked to organized an "ingathering" service on the first evening after supper, and an internal group (which turned out to be women) also organized a "home going" service at the end.

2. One strand was the history of the denomination. This was NOT small groups: just a short lecture every afternoon.

3. One strand (really the central one) was organizational design principles. How to keep process going, how to resolve conflict, how to define a goal and a strategy. We used formidable amounts of felt-tip and newsprint.

4. One strand was journal-keeping last thing before bedtime in which participants processed what they had felt during the day, what they had learned, what scared them, what empowered them, etc. Also a bit of credo writing.

It’s noon as I write and the temp is below zero f. My notes for Leadership School (I kept ‘em all!) are out in the garage so I won’t go searching for them today. But expect more comment in the future as things warm up.