A THOUSAND LITTLE SCHISMS, FANCIES, SLIGHTS AND ADVANTAGES

The most difficult concept for off-rez people to understand is that the rez is not defined by its boundaries.  Boundaries, agreed-upon and recorded lines making a distinction between what’s on one side and what’s on the other, are a Euro concept that goes back to the Egyptians trying to keep track of farm land that was overlain by fertile silt from rivers every spring.  There has to be an edge to a “built” environment.  Euros privilege what is “built,” “owned,” “planted,” “used.”

A tribe is based on centers.  It develops organically from a central anchoring point and then spreads out through interaction or proliferation, which means it is rhizomatous and nomadic, concepts that paradoxically come out of Euro thinkers working against the confinement, enforcement, and destruction from the Euro ideas.  Tribal center-based organization is so natural and gradual that it is rarely defined or described.  It is a “felt” concept that feels like reality.  And it is.

So thinking about the chaos currently “felt” on the Blackfeet reservation means bringing up to consciousness things that have been taken for granted.  This chaos IMHO is a necessary turning out of pockets and emptying of closets.  It is, in Eric Berne’s terms, a game of “Uproar,” which means that when you are losing at chess and have run out of effective strategies, you just turn over the table and let the pieces scatter.  Then you have to start a new game.  Maybe with new rules.

In ancient days the most common “center” was a nuclear family which quickly extended as far as resources would allow.  Not all members of the resulting band were genetically related.  New members might come voluntarily, attracted through friendships or adventures, but others might be captured, particularly women.  This meant -- since women carry the culture and teach it to the children -- a continuing flow of new ideas.  New ideas, combined with the variety of personalities, meant that occasionally there were dissenters and iconoclasts in the band.  These could lead to breakaway groups who decided to travel a different path.  

Check out Tony Bynum's website: tonybynum.com

To put this is more familiar terms, religious groups are held together by affinities and divided by controversies.  The stronger the affinity, the more internal friction can be tolerated and even translated into growth in numbers and sophistication.  If major controversies show up -- often over resources, though they might be disguised as ideologies -- the group will split.  Unitarian congregations in big cities -- already centered on freedom to think -- will often have satellite “fellowships” (small groups with no ministers) who differ in some opinion or style.  Once in a while there will be sweeping religious movements to re-consolidate all these groups.  Sometimes that comes from economic or political pressure from outside, and once in a long while it results from a flashing and intense new idea that pulls everyone together.  Tribes work just like that.

Orange is buffalo range, red is tribally occupied

The Amskapi Pikuni division of the Siksika nation was at one point reduced to only 500 souls, half of them children.  The loss of continuity, connection, and expertise was drastic.  The result of trauma and starvation was mixed, pitting compliance in the interest of survival against defiance for the same motive.  Some collaborated with the Euros and others opposed them to the point of death.  Another group just hunkered down to wait, knowing that all things pass.

This was only one of the sources of mixing, acquiring, and discarding that have resulted in today’s tribe.  The usual generational variation was accentuated by the practice of early whites, usually men, of marrying tribal women, sometimes as access to powerful families, sometimes for their personal comfort and convenience (frontier life means the need for a supply and repair source -- a moccasin maker, hide tanner, house owner), and occasionally out of true love.  The Culbertsons are an outstanding example.  But there are no Culbertson’s now.  The Kipps are another example and there are many Kipps now.  But that’s only to go by Euro ideas of descent which are patriarchal and ownership-based.  The older ways were much more individual, using “dreams” as the justification for nonconformity.  Each man had his own vision.  Each Kipp is unique.  And a descendant of Culbertson's wife, Natawista, showed up in a Cut Bank classroom -- he just wasn't named Culbertson.

Women could be a source of either unity or division, depending on how well they got along esp. in polygamous households.  Though men could be violent, women held the plurality and had the potential to make life miserable for a tyrant.  Their children and brothers added credibility.  A skillful woman who knew the territory and its resources from camas to paint minerals to the efficient processing of a buffalo carcass was an invaluable resource for a warrior or hunter.  This continues, except now a skillful person (unassigned as to gender) can navigate the Internet, keep household appliances operating, shop wisely, and chair a productive meeting.

The first split among the Amskapi Pikuni was between full-blood and mixed blood, with the advantages of a white father tending to pull people out onto the flats to grow grain while an old-timey father might choose a Dawes allotment in the foothills because of the hunting and water.  When everything was in trust, the fortunes of all were tied together and they still are for the lands and resources held in common.  In Canada where the tribe was treated as a cooperative, individuals are held down in some ways (no chance to use individually owned land as collateral for a loan or to cash it in at retirement) but supported in others (no need to acquire enough money to buy a ranch).  The Devil’s Bargain on the US side is that people were allotted land of quite different qualities and though the argument was that they were certainly capable of managing their own assets, the disadvantages of not having English language and not understanding the strange Euro practice of bookkeeping standing for reality meant that many people lost their land one way or another.  Fractionation is another dismaying problem.

Being located meant community formed out of neighborhoods, either the way people cluster around amenities (originally a fort) and or in what I call “long towns” along the rivers.  Now they cluster on the Internet.  The oil community -- those who manage the work -- or the livestock community form out of mutual interests. Newly built housing clusters have created neighborhoods, almost accidentally.

There is less chaos than there is subtle conflict between forces meant to provide survival.  Complicating the picture even more is the infiltration of covert outsider forces, mostly white businessmen, who use enrolled people as cat’s paws -- masks -- to access entitlements meant to level the playing field for the enrolled.  Sometimes the tribal members are well aware they are being used and other times they just see the advantages of having a patron.  No one spends much time wondering how much such white players want to prevent change because it will lose them money.  In the background always hovers the threat to close down the reservation.

In a community where there is no money at all, there are systems of violence (who are you afraid of, who is an enforcer), sex (who do you love, who shares your parenthood), and secrets.  Secrets include the illegal substance networks and a certain amount of human trafficking.  Now that we learn about it, we see that can mean trafficking in labor.  But fire-fighting has progressed from when authorities would simply seize drunks off the streets and take them onto the firelines without even notifying family.  If they survived and were paid, no one cared much.  Today fire-fighting is professional, requiring training and health-monitoring.

CHIEF MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS 
L to R: Lyle St. Goddard, Rod Bullshoe, Willard Pepion, Eli Stillmoking, Doug Malatare, Joanne Cadotte, Josh Salway, Sheldon Brewer, Loren Young Running Crane, Tim Sure Chief, Allen Dale Vielle - Bottom L to R: Steve Bullshoe, Earl Old Chief, Jovon Fisher, Dale Tatsey, Gordon North Piegan, Brenda McDougall, Clinton Dusty Bull

Ideas need to be thrown out to keep us from treading the same old dead-end paths. What we need is that one huge compelling and energizing goal that can pull everyone all together.  In the end it’s always survival, but along the way there are many small strategies that move towards mini-survivals.  Pick up the chess pieces carefully and take a good look at the chessboard.  It’s strategy that counts.  A lot of little strategies can add up to a big result.

CIVIL SERVICE TESTING IS A PROCESS

The recent Supreme Court decision brought me back to a subject I’ve mulled over for many years -- since 1973, in fact. The recent decision had to do with testing for promotions and hiring by a fire department but I was thinking about the civil service test that propelled me into being an animal control officer, dog-catcher to the vulgar unenlightened.

What wasn’t addressed by the Supreme Court was that the tests are always a reflection of what Civil Service employees think the job is. If you think of fire departments as daring heroes dragging hoses into a holocaust and saving small children, that will mean one kind of test. If you think of fighting fires as a scientifically informed and strategic deployment of coordinated forces, you’ll want another kind of test. The kicker is that the whole idea of “testing” evokes school and those who have had to provide results quickly know that multiple choice is great to grade. Hard to write without raising issues, maybe, as the college qualifying tests well know.

The fire fighting tests were not attacked on grounds that the questions were poorly written. Rather the argument, which was supported by the results, is that multiple choice tests cause whites (who are culturally congruent) to score higher than blacks or, indeed, browns. The particular test in question was 60% weighted to multiple choice and produced NO black scorers high enough to be hired or promoted, which surprised the culture-dumb city.

Civil service people who write tests are influenced by the advice of those who work with the present job holders. At the particular time that I was taking the test for ACO, the previous version was designed by an enterprising young woman who thought the point was to pursue and capture dogs -- right? So as part of the test she designed something that looked like one of those dog agility tests: the applicant scrambled through a tube, leapt over a desk, ran a quick labyrinth of chairs, and jumped over a carpet. She didn’t understand that capturing a dog is more a matter of strategy than agility. As Mel Martsolf, our field supervisor, used to point out, “You have two legs -- dogs have four.”

So the test I took, which was partly responding to Mike Burgwin, the new assistant manager, focused on thinking and the ability to write a decent report, which is the basis of conviction in court. As a former English teacher, I had a clear advantage.

There was also a bit of questioning about dog breeds, since descriptions of dogs were controlled by those categories. Dog breeds as a concept are about as useful as the concept of human races, which is closely related. Both began as location-adapted appearance and abilities, which were soon muddled and dispersed by people and animals moving around the planet. The assumptions attached to, say, a herding animal when any diverging offspring were simply destroyed became useless when people began to raise “breeds” for money, selling “pet-quality” animals at a discount instead of culling them. On the other hand, close-inbreeding to meet arbitrary standards soon caused some very bad genetic faults to be perpetuated. In the end, dogs have their own plans which don’t include being status-markers in shows. The biggest and boldest gets the most puppies and the standards are a real bitch. That's why mutts are high quality.

So I was at the top of the list for the animal control job at a time when jobs were scarce and more than a hundred showed up for the multiple choice part. The next person on the list was a pre-veterinary student, also female. There had never been a female officer. The third was male and the manager -- virulently sexist -- tried to hire him, but he turned out to have a felony record. Since we were technically sheriff’s deputies, this disqualified him. The next person on the list was probably the most highly qualified, a jazzy blonde who had refused to spend a nice weekend at the beach with the manager so she could forget it. After much strategy meant to shake me off, I got the job.

I passed the interview part of the test because of my experience on the Blackfeet Reservation, which particularly impressed the young black man on the interviewing panel. No black person scored high on the test and, in fact, I don’t remember any of them taking the test at all. That community is not fond of dogs OR law officers. The two animal control officers who had been doing the job for years had been required to re-take the test. They didn’t pass. Rationalizations were found to keep them working: special status, grandfathered, something like that. They were both the very best at actually “catching” dogs but they had a tendency to color a little outside the legal lines. One had had polio and limped badly, but was a very wily guy and good at roping, which was not on the test.

Decades later I applied for the job I had once held, mostly out of curiosity. This time an item on the test consisted of choosing a dog from a kennel and loading it into the new expensive separate-compartment trucks. I flunked because I couldn’t do ten sit-ups. The examiners had been instructed to eliminate anyone who might end up on disability with a bad back.

Tests are like maps: sometimes they relate to the territory and sometimes they don’t. They can hardly be more than a rough guide or, as someone pointed out about terrain, to contain ALL the information they would have to BE the terrain. But sometimes a new kind of map can take one into uncharted territory, which this test did for me. As well, it made some new roads for animal control since the sexist manager left shortly, the assistant manager was promoted, and he supported an effort for us to get smarter and more professional. My writing skills and teaching experience helped me design a program of education. All this led to NACA, the National Animal Control Association, a continuing force for professionalization and research.

Then came the Civil Service exam for the education coordinator job I had invented. I came in second. The interview panel liked a hotshot handsome young man with PR experience a lot better. Luckily, since the manager could legally hire any of the top three people, he did hire me -- after torturing me with doubt for a while.

The bottom line is that people are far too quick to assume that testing really IS something. The ultimate way to tell whether someone will be good in a job is in retrospect, but that’s of no use when hiring. Anyway, jobs change. Animal Control is moving from shelter-based humane enforcement, to street-located prevention and intervention for both animals and people.

PASSIONATE DISSENT

My minister in Portland -- the old-fashioned male one who was not afraid to thunder from the pulpit -- used to ruefully note that there was a man in the congregation who said he didn’t know what position to take on an issue until he heard what the minister said -- then he knew he was convinced of the opposite. There are movie reviewers like that, too, valuable because they are so dependably opposite. When kids take that attitude they are said to have “oppositional defiance disorder.” But the Unitarian Universalist denomination formed in oppositional defiance to Calvinism. The Unitarians thought the Trinity was a nonsensical doctrine and the Universalists thought predestination to hell made no sense. In those days denominations formed based on doctrine. The two separate movements found common cause and merged in 1961 for more practical reasons -- like money.

Anyway, it is perfectly obvious that most denominations and religions (“denomination” is a word invented to describe subsets within the Christian context) are mostly social affinity groups based more on class, education, ethnicity, and similar forces. But the UUA advertises itself as a denomination that can absorb people of many different kinds and styles, that protects doctrinal heresy.

The very fact that the boundaries are weak and porous makes the institutional maintenance of the denomination pretty problematic. That is, the practical matters of hiring, creating materials, supplying managerial needs, encouraging growth, and all the other business of any corporation are based on defining the edge. Usually it comes down to money and membership numbers: if a congregation has enough people willing to sign up and pay dues, and if they forward their obligation to the “association,” then they’re in. It’s a very loose, rather fragile, and hard to explain sort of thing, usually dodged by going back to the doctrinal statement, which in the UUA is so inclusive as to be meaningless or at least interpretable.

This make Robin Edgar very angry indeed. He has mounted an attack through blogging: http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com

“The Emerson Avenger is a "memory hole" free blog where censorship is scorned. This blog will "guard the right to know" about any injustices and abuses that corrupt Unitarian Universalism. Posters may speak and argue freely, according to conscience, about any injustices and abuses, or indeed hypocrisy, that they may know about so that the Avenger, in the form of justice and redress, may come surely and swiftly. . . "Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely." - Ralph Waldo Emerson”

Robin’s quote is from THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW lecture read in the tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11 (Miscellanies) [1909]
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27

Robin Edgar says: “In 1992 I underwent a profound revelatory experience of God which revealed that the total solar eclipse "Eye of God" is a "Sign in the Heavens" that symbolizes God's divine omniscience. This revelatory religious experience inspired me to propose an inter-religious celebration of Creation that would take place whenever a total solar eclipse took place over our planet.” [Robin was labeled a cult leader.] I am now an excommunicated Unitarian whose "alternative spiritual practice" includes publicly exposing and denouncing Unitarian*Universalist injustices, abuses, and hypocrisy.”

So Robin wants “in” to the denomination and the denomination wants Robin “out.” Or at least his opinions and denunciations. They call him a madman, he calls them corrupt. I am familiar with this dynamic, having stepped out of the UU ministry, a context which provided me with lots of stories of injustice, abuse and hypocrisy -- to say nothing of prosecutable offenses. They are present in any defined institution one is able to identify. The schools, the government, the military, the village -- all being assembled of human beings, all include faulty and wicked people. The institution, of course, tries to define critics as the problem and to throw them out. (Kill the messenger.)

Robin has the idea that the UUA is based on monotheism and once upon a time it was. Since the 19th century, it has become a haven for atheists and with atheism has come a streak of defiance of all laws that used to be enforced by the Great Papa God. “You can’t tell me what to do” linked with “you don’t exist anyway!” It’s a way of defining oneself against limits that no longer exist. What is passionately effective against an old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priest with beard and mitre, one of those powerful men who make and break history, is completely ineffective against a nice, well-educated, sympathetic, young, suburban, female UU minister. (This seems to be the new pattern.) Not that some UU ministers, male and female, don’t persist in thinking they are old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priests, which goes to one of the sources of corruption.

What is to be done? Why do anything? What would be the goal? So long as Robin doesn’t enter the public assemblies of UU people and disrupt their proceedings, what’s wrong with him blogging and emailing as much as he wants? Isn’t that exactly what Emerson was doing when he delivered lectures against the Fugitive Slave Law ?

When I was doing my hospital chaplaincy on the neurology ward, I ran athwart a brain surgery formerly a Jesuit monk. He wanted me prevented from talking to a man who had a brain tumor. The man said that a “ball of light” came to him in the night and told him he would be healed. The brain surgeon was afraid I would tell him he was a nut case and that his epiphany was just brain damage. He assumed I would take a scientifically-based and rather brutal approach because I was a UU.

I was never clear about whether this surgeon didn’t want me to upset his patient or really was quietly leaving room for the possibility that the “ball of light” was real and the epiphany was valid, if possibly misinterpreted, though he had to know from his own explorations that the reality was brutally fatal. We didn’t talk.

But I did, in defiant opposition, sneak in to talk to the patient. He told me, his face glowing, about his vision. I told him he was fortunate indeed to have such a precious and merciful gift.