THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

Brian Kahn is a handsome, broad-shouldered lawyer married to a beautiful artist.  He runs an organization of inquiry and advocacy.  http://www.thelastlink.org/artemis/artemis.html.   He’s from California, but I try not to hold it against him.  (I’m in Montana, but too far north in the state for him to visit.  Anyway not in winter.)  He has a weekly public radio interview show, which is archived online. You can listen to it by streaming Yellowstone Public Radio or by going to the archive. Here's the link:  http://www.yellowstonepublicradio.org/programs/local/home_ground.html   

Last night’s program (Dec. 3) was about Montana kids defined as “crazy” when in fact it is their families who are insane if not in jail.  Brian interviewed two female clinical psych workers who constantly work to “wrap around” these families and get them operating again.  They say,  “We don’t push them away.  We pull them in close to talk to them, even if they kick us in the shins.  We want to know them.”  They try to avoid meds.

They presented a composite story of a young woman with all the “ten indicators” of psychosis and explained them.  (The list I found online has 11.  Same stuff.)  They do what is sometimes called “acting out.”  Often the kids will replicate what troubles them: assaults, forced sex, stealing, lying, fantasy, running away, destruction, drinking, drugs.

http://www.livescience.com/35938-mental-illness-children-warning-signs.html

• Feeling very sad or withdrawn for two or more weeks
• Seriously trying to harm or kill yourself, or making plans to do so
• Sudden overwhelming fear for no reason, sometimes with a racing heart or fast breathing
• Involved in multiple fights, using a weapon, or wanting badly to hurt others
• Severe, out- of-control behavior that can hurt yourself or others
• Not eating, throwing up or using laxatives to make yourself lose weight
• Intensive worries or fears that get in the way of daily activities
• Extreme difficulty in concentrating or staying still that puts you in physical danger or causes school failure
• Repeated use of drugs or alcohol
• Severe mood swings that cause problems in relationships
• Drastic changes in your behavior or personality

Sometimes I respond to Brian and he always acknowledges it.  This time I said:  “Our culture itself is abusive:  we require things that are not possible, we punish their failure with violence and confinement, we are all obsessed with sex defined as domination, and we wonder why marriages fail.  Money is the measure of all things.

“Who 'wraps around' a culture?  Religion?  Government?  Media?

“If Pope Francis can take it on, why can't we?   The planet may be turning.”

In response, Brian sent me a copy of  Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today's World (24 November 2013)  which has flipped the Catholic world on its ear with surprise and on its face with gratitude!   Pope Francis has captured the flag. 

I replied to Brian:

"Yes, I've been following Francis and the talk about him.  Because of having been a minister and because of being an alumni of the U of Chicago Divinity School, I'm on mailing lists that follow discussion of any and all new developments and the Pope has their full attention.

There are a few ways he needs to go even deeper, but he's certainly a powerful focus on the right issues."

The things I note below are crippling the Catholic (basically Roman) convictions.  They are far more important than who gets to be a priest (Just DO it -- you don’t have to be ordained -- and there are far more sexual orientations than male/female.)

1.  There are too many people.  We will HAVE to come to some kind of birth control.

2.  Institutions always put first their own self-perpetuation.  The only reason the Pope can talk like this is that the cardinals realize that without change the Catholics will die out -- already are except in the Southern Hemisphere. Denominations try to promote their specialness at the expense of others and by doing so, eventually devalue themselves --  indeed, the whole concept.

3.  Underneath all the dogma and talk and service to the least of these has to be an empowering connection to the nonverbal FELT sacredness of the world in all its sensory richness.  To put all the emphasis on something in "another world" where rewards are deferred until after death is a vulnerability.  To make a humongous humanoid the object of felt sacredness doesn't work for all of us.

This is the mammal that survived the dinosaurs.  That's a radio transmitter on it's neck.

Brian Kahn has clearly been thinking about evolution, but he is still seeing "survival of the fittest" in terms of power and domination.  He has forgotten the lesson of the mammal, which in its teeny furry long-nosed prey form ran between the toes of the dinosaurs and proved therefore more FIT for a new world.

At the same time that I’m talking to Brian via email, I’m talking to Helen Macdonald in Cambridge, England.   http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/people/macdonald.html  She is a professor there, a woman who flies hawks, and one of the finest writers I’ve ever read, believe me.  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Helen+Macdonald&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AHelen+Macdonald

I was going back and forth with her on Twitter where she had posted the dismaying news that peregrine falcon populations in the north are being killed by unseasonable rain, which soaks the chicks and makes them hypothermic.  This is climate change diminishing habitat.  So I asked for examples of climate change expanding habitat, because climate change is habitat change writ large.
  

Then, since when I went out to feed the feral cats there was a V of traveling geese flying low over town, I proposed a little continuum:  the birds go from one habitat to another by going north/south;  the little mammals (pikas, marmots) adapt by going to higher or lower altitudes; the poor trees cannot migrate as individuals, but perhaps as one edge of forest contracts, another expands; and humans simply change the world to suit us at the expense of all the other habitats.  (Water is the most unmanageable factor in habitats as we notice with increasing desertification and rising seas.)  

Helen notes that an expanding hawk habitat is that of the city where the hawks live on the skyscrapers and eat park pigeons.  Then she says how she loves the cry of the wild geese,  so I posted this for her:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9VrgRIgOK0 .  She didn’t know it.   Too young.  Not a big hit in her circles.  But it’s key to mine since the day it was on the radio in 1950.  (I was eleven years old.) A great cure for depression, a clear clamor for moving on.  A vital use of the Internet to time travel.

Brian is operating out of a different paradigm than I am.  He believes in organizations, rule structures, exceptional and inspired individuals, rational argument.  He replies:   “SEEMS TO ME PART OF THIS IS GETTING LOST IN THE WEEDS OF PERSONAL VIEWS WHILE IN FRONT OF YOU IS A NEW, CLEAR, GLOBAL VOICE FOR ESSENTIAL -- AND I MEAN ESSENTIAL -- ECONOMIC SANITY.”  

It’s my challenge of what is “fitness” that is too weedy and personal for him.  His personal idea of success is opposite to mine, which is to have the freedom to be poor and write all day -- NO meetings!!  More of a bird-watcher approach.  I propose that what is endangered in one place is the “fittest” in another.  It may be that “psychotic” and delinquent kids who have been annealed in a family fire will be the ones who are tough and devious enough to create a culture that protects the hawk in the arctic as well as the child in the streets.   

The habitat of the human being is impalpable and ineffable and unpredictable.  It is here.  It is a song sung long ago but preserved in human hearts and technology.

Brian says:

I'm amazed you found that 10+-year old site.  It was created for a film and is obsolete, including the contact info.

In my view,  you have not accurately summarized what I believe in.  I don't remember if you've read my book, REAL COMMON SENSE -- it says what I believe. 

CINDY BLACKSTOCK

When I first got to Saskatoon in 1986 to serve the Unitarian congregation, I joined a circle of professional women counselors.  I was surprised that they all still traveled to workshops at Esalen in California, which the States-side people by then thought was passé and even laughable.  If the subject came up, you’d hear only jokes about what Fritz Perls did with his big toe in the hot tub.  Still, those smart, engaged Canadian women found the work useful.  Recently, when I began to hear about Abraham Maslow in Alberta, I was afraid it was going to be some time-lag anachronistic sort of situation.  It is not.  They are making the ideas work the way they are supposed to.

Cindy Blackstock is a social worker and an academic who is developing a new way of helping aboriginal kids because the old way just isn’t effective.  Sometimes called “Breath of Life,” it is a humanistic approach that does not start from a prescriptive premise about what should be done.  Rather it looks at the tribal origins of the child and develops a Maslowian pyramid of needs and ways of meeting them that come out of the aboriginal background.  All it takes is money. To get money, one must tell one’s story.  Maybe in a movie like this one:

Shannen Koostachin

Alanis Obomsawin

“Hi-Ho Mistahey!” is a documentary film by  Canadian director Alanis Obomsawin, which was released in 2013. The film profiles “Shannen’s Dream, an activist campaign first launched by Shannen Koostachin, a Cree teenager from Attawapiskat , to lobby for improved educational opportunities for First Nations youth. . .The film's title is Cree for "I love you forever." Obomsawin has said she heard about Koostachin's story from childrens' rights activist Cindy Blackstock.

Six years ago Blackstock accused the Canadian government of financially short-sheeting aboriginal students.  The government (which is NOT the soft and ladylike entity that many Americans envision) hammered her for her audacity.  They eavesdropped on her computer and kept her under surveillance.  She turned them in to the governmental monitors for that -- I’m not sure there’s a decision yet.  Whether her brilliant breakthrough ideas about child welfare came out of that experience or were in spite of them, they certainly look worthy to me.  But if the simplest appeal for money is met with such suspicion, it’s no wonder that little progress gets made for rez kids in any country.

Cindy Blackstock

“The Emergence of the Breath of Life Theory” by Cindy Blackstock, PhD.  First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, University of Alberta.  Published in the Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics, Volume 8, Number 1 (2011) Copyright 2011, White Hat Communications.  This online article does a good job of laying out the basic concepts and justification.  www.socialworker.com/jswve/spr11/spr11blackstock.pdf‎

For a vivid sample of how formidable she can be:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTl5UsJLXGY .

Terry Cross

Terry Tafoya

The equivalent in the States might be Terry Tafoya.  Another admired and creative person is Terry L. Cross, MSW, ACSW, LCSW (Seneca Nation of Indians) director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association.  All the people above have worked in the Pacific Northwest area where the New Age has never been abandoned: plenty of gray pony tails.  On the Blackfeet rez Theda New Breast is a standout leader.  That’s who organized the workshop I attended last week that kicked off this series of posts.

I’ve just found this complex of theories, so I’ve only begun to do the reading, though some of the materials are familiar already.  Blackstock is frank about saying that they are still developing and sharpening.  What I see as still needed is the acknowledgement that tribes arise from human biogeography, each according to what is necessary for the survival of people in that ecology, and valuing what arises from that place.  It’s the land that forms indigenous people. This is why it doesn’t work work to lump all Indians into one movement, even though Pan-Indian organization is good politics because it produces critical mass of voters.

  

Breath of Life is clear that each tribe has its own ways, but has not gone deeper to how the relationship to the land determines what the economic base will be and therefore the qualities that need to be encouraged in those children.  I think this is because the education and development of social work is traditionally rooted in the cities where it has emerged from helping immigrants become adjusted to this country, or maybe adjusting country people to city life.  Theda’s advantage is being local as well as native.

American Indians are in the paradoxical situation of being displaced in their own country, on their own land, even held captive in front of television screens that let advertising from Manhattan or LA be their “assimilators.”  This is understood by many.  Programs exist and grow every year to teach traditional skills, get involved in the natural history of the place, open up to the metaphors that come out of earth and sky, the unique sensorium of each tribe’s material culture.   Now -- with electronic tablets that even a small child can operate -- it’s possible to roam the planet and come back home again, while never leaving one’s chair.  But it’s necessary to get out of the chair so as to participate.  You’ll never learn to prairie chicken dance while sitting down!

These principles, this point of view, is not just relevant to tribal kids.  There are other categories of kids trapped in syndemics: illegal immigrants, street kids infected with HIV, trafficked kids, child soldiers.  And, oddly, many kids with parents who never interact with them because they work several jobs to survive.  They amount to landless tribes, no place to go, no safety, no belonging.  But they do have one “place” where they are together:  online.  They speak one language: video.  They have one foundational requirement: visibility.  To the general public, they are mostly invisible.

Native Americans know how that feels.  Unless they’re on a horse or wearing feathers, the public thinks they’re maybe Italian.  Even knowing someone is tribal doesn’t necessarily help if the only thing the person knows about Indians is Tonto.  Recognition is a little higher on the pyramid than safety, shelter, food and water, but not by much.  So the dilemma has been how to become educated and even “hip” to the modern world of mixed-but-still-mostly-white world without losing identity as an indigenous person of a particular place on the planet, especially when moving to the city. 

Focusing on kids is not just idealistic in terms of giving each of them a better life, but also practical in terms of improving the lives of everyone.  Less confusion, less dysfunction, more energy, more creativity.  The status quo, often because they fear change will cost them power, try to withhold money in order to stop time.  This is true on the family level, the local level, the national level, and the global level.  It is true in the larger society and also true in the covert counterculture and underground societies that always accompany what is known and public.  Highly principled and devoted individuals who inspire others can make changes happen in spite of social inertia.  But it ain’t easy.