RELIGION AND JUSTICE ON THE REZ

On 12-7-11 my post on this blog was a list of names from a card file I’d been keeping for years.  On each card was the obit from the GF Tribune for some person either on the Blackfeet reservation or related to it somehow.  I had noticed that the cause of death was unknown for some of these people.  There are always complaints that murders and other criminal deaths and violence on the reservation are going unprosecuted.  This is not unrelated to the number of people who just disappear.  This morning a comment was submitted on this post that was about just such a case.  I don’t want to use the person’s name and it came in anonymously anyway, but I’ll quote the part that is a reference to the Bible.

When Cain slew his brother Abel ...God the creator heard Abel's blood that was crying from the ground all the way to heaven.  

When King David saw another man's wife, he made arrangements for that other man to be on the front lines of the battle. To make sure that he would get killed. And he took that man's wife and when the man of God came he exposed what King David did. God has forgiven you ....but the sword (or Judgement) would never leave his house. Jesus taught ..nothing would be hid ...any said or done in secret would be shouted upon the roof tops.

There were enough clues for me to find an article about this case in Indian Country Today, where the reporter emphasized that the Blackfeet rez is considered a lawless place that tolerates murder and she attributed much of this to drug use.   (Oh, thanks, Paul Harvey!) This is a very tangled and emotional subject and I want to pull it apart in a slightly different way.

First, the Judeo-Christian religious/governance world is one that attributes the highest judgement to a harsh God.  (Jesus encouraged mercy.) It is a world dependent on written rules and laws, beginning with the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi.  The intent is not just to prevent bad things happening, but also to prevent justice from disintegrating into raw revenge that continues violence.  It is punishment-centered.

The Blackfeet culture was oral -- nothing was written out in negotiated or dictated rules until the Euro people arrived and imposed THEIR standards.  The Nitsitahpi used social pressure or simple departure to keep order, which worked fine so long as they were in small related groups where everyone knew what was happening.  Even after the US government drew a boundary separating the governance of the reservation from the rest of the territory, the Blackfeet people continued their old ways alongside the new.

Today there are three kinds of disorder on the reservation:  those that are crimes of bookkeeping and asset diversion (what is called corruption); those that are crimes of violence emerging from the use of drugs and alcohol; and those that are cold-blooded amoral criminal behavior.  I acknowledge the first kind but won’t address it here.

The second kind results from brain damage, either temporary (drugs) or permanent (trauma), that is partly a matter of emotional syndrome and partly actual destruction of tissue resulting in loss of control: extreme over-reaction, rage attacks, inability to curb damage to the weak and innocent.  In all, the result is something like a demolition derby because the body has no brakes, no steering, and a stuck gas pedal.  When I was first teaching in Browning in a classroom that overlooked what was then Moccasin Flats, I looked out one morning to see a woman in a pickup trying to run over a man rolling around under it.  They had been drinking all night and she was trying to kill him but she didn’t have enough control to get a wheel to go over him.  It was lucky that the pickup was old and had a lot of space under it.  I know what uncontrolled alcohol-fueled violence looks like.  Meth is worse.  MUCH worse.  After parties that turn into brawls, no one is a reliable witness.

There is no way a written law can prevent such a thing.  It can only set the punishment and even then it is almost impossible to judge in terms of intentions because there was no thinking involved.  This is the kind of murder that -- like that between Cain and Abel -- was based on emotion and loss of control.  (Maybe they were drunk!)  The Issksiniip Project, by providing ways to kick addiction and deal with strong emotion, can address this sort of crime.  Cops hate mindless brawling because they are likely to be hurt or killed when trying to intervene and because when it gets to the cool logic of the court, there’s really no way to apply principles of justice.

But this sort of situation provides a cover, like King David using war to get rid of Bathsheba’s husband.  Illegals from south of the border who have Indian genes don’t stand out on the reservation.  Legal immigrants are often exceptionally family-loving and hard-working, but there is a small fraction of illegals who engage in drug distribution, child and woman trafficking, gambling crime, and other behavior that laws are meant to prevent.  Today there are about 8,000 enrolled Blackfeet on the reservation.  They do not all know each other and may have relationships with people whose motives are shady.   This is the third category,  which is violent organized crime: cold-blooded, calculated, and obscured by the constant whirlwind of gangs, drinking, drugs, and family abuse.

The FBI would love to be able to come sort through people’s lives to discover and extradite national criminals.  Replacing trust with force has become the pattern since Wounded Knee (actually from the beginning of white/Indian relationships or neither Wounded Knee 1or 2 would have happened), no one from the outside can occasionally visit the rez expecting to understand what goes on.  When I say “outside,” I mean outside the rez boundary, but the FBI keeps withdrawing farther and farther.  They are an urban organization.  Even in Valier I rarely know what’s happening a few miles away across the line.  Court testimony is unreliable, partly because of threats against witnesses and partly because of family loyalties.  Blackfeet naturally try to protect their own.

There has been a movement among the police that originated in cities, notably New York City.  The idea is that if the police crack down on trivial disorder -- trash, broken windows, derelict cars -- that the larger crimes of murder and violence will diminish.  This seems to be true and is beginning to be put into practice in Browning where the old buildings that shelter addicts are coming down. (So now where do they go?)  One can eliminate predators by destroying their habitat, but sometimes that also destroys the innocent.  And the result may be very profitable to people who don’t seem to be criminals at all, just merchants and developers.  (Always follow the money.)

The Great Falls Tribune pointed out to me that I could get death certificates that list the final decision about death for anyone: $10 fee from county and state records.   It would cost several hundred dollars to get certificates for everyone on my short list.  Now they have stopped publishing obits that weren’t paid for and didn’t originate with the families.  For instance, no obituary appeared in that paper for Joyce Clarke Turvey, despite her connection to an historically significant family and her contribution to the Glacier National Park complex.  (It was in the Cut Bank based newspapers.)  Her death was natural -- she was in her eighties.  But not telling her story is a loss of history to a larger community than the rez.  The impulse to secrecy and avoiding trouble is a strong one, but dangerous in a democracy because it reinforces our rising suspicions about what’s going on.

So, three sources of crime:  1)  The bookkeeping crimes of embezzlement and theft that are encouraged by huge blocks of money arriving without anyone following up to inspect its use because the rez is just too scary and far away.  2) The often lethal damage of drug and alcohol fueled rage and trauma.  3)  Criminals taking advantage of the confusion of behavior and the inability of the law to deal with it.

Maybe someone is looking for an excuse to close down the rez.

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