akdfsa

I’ve never been so excited for a bingo game. I’ve never even been to a bingo game.

The Elders group have determined that a bingo night will be their first fundraiser. They’ve set the date and figured out all the details. I’ve worked to stress that this event is not just a way to increase capital, it is a community service.

My concern about whether or not they'd step up and take responsibility was assuaged by the almost hands off delegation I performed at the last meeting. The group is growing increasingly independent.

Individuals are beginning to address the group when they're talking, offering ideas, rather than just me. I set the table up in an even square, even still C pulled a chair to the fringes of the room and stated:

“Like sitting in the back of class.”

I encouraged her to join the group but she insisted upon staying on the fringes, effectively breaking the circle and placing me in the front of the group.

Every suggestion was phrased thusly to me:

“You should, what you need to do, etc…”

The concept of a group belonging to its members is completely alien down here. The group must belong to an outsider, someone else. I had the same problem for the first five months of relations with the tribe. Every project was my project. Even opening of an account dedicated to funding community events and programs was impossible, that fund had to be my bank account. The tribe takes care of enrollment, dispersing payments from the casinos, and everything else belonged to CIMC or another non-profit dedicated to serving Indian country.

Ironically, most of these non-profits were started by Indians who were upset with the lack of services available to their communities. R often points out that the tribe underwrote the founding of most prominent non-tribal non-profits in the state. Then he usually gripes about how that organization doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, how they don't realize that the tribe supported them.

The group belongs to someone else. The service belongs to someone else, despite the fact that the tribe is its target population. Similarly, even this Elders group is displaced from the core group at its center. Until recently, many among the membership considered this to be my group, a service I was providing to the Elders. For a community that rejects the influence of outsiders so heartily, they often depend on those same individuals to administer all their services.

But it’s beginning to fade. I hear second hand that the Elders are discussing how I’m leaving soon. I want it to feel like it’s tomorrow. There needs to be an immediacy and in those conversations, it is always in reference to the group’s need to develop independence beyond what I facilitate, and to do that soon.

I get discouraged, when people still make me the focal point of meetings, expecting me to do all the work. If this persists much longer, I don't think the group will last, but these last few meetings, the Elders have shown a degree of self-determination that is otherwise unprecedented in my work with the community.

I almost met another stopping block in getting money to the Elders. The tribe wrote for a grant and put some of that money towards the Elders, with the idea that they would administer it themselves. Even still, the hesitancy to give them a lump sum was extreme from a few people in the office, the same people that tended to derail any projects I came up with that would require money.

I am very glad R and I have an understanding about this group, because he was able to make sure the money would be given to the Elders in two lump sums (rather than be given only as a re-imbursement provided there is a receipt of purchase). The Elders will still have to account for every dollar they spend, but trusting them with this money is to support their independence and encourage self-determination among the community.

I consider things like this, money given rather than with a receipt two weeks later in a re-imbursement, to be stopping blocks for individuals and groups. When people are so beaten down, just adding a few extra steps to accessing services or planning events can throw the whole thing off.

It was like P’s grandson who was popping into my office more and more before she got fired. I’d give him my video camera, give him some basic non-restrictive rules (keep this strap around your neck and put your hand like this), and let him run with it. Where he went? No clue. What he shot? Not sure. The CIMC youth workers were aghast when they saw him sprinting out the door with my camera dangling precariously around his neck.

“You let him do that?” they asked.

“Why not?”

No reply. Trust is imperative when you’re trying to get an individual, a group, or a community on their feet.


When I left the meeting it was dark. The Elders had all already left. The lights outside the community building weren't working. It was so dark I couldn’t see my feet, my hands, the road, the sky, the trees. I dragged my feet on the ground to be sure i was still on the pavement.

Despite the crescent moon, there is little or no illumination. I think much of this is due to the absolute lack of cloud cover, but rather a void dotted by points of crystal, stars clearer than I’ve ever seen.

After fumbling with the lock I started pacing carefully towards my car, which was grey and humble within the pitch deep well black of the night. There was a relative silence. B must've been asleep, no lights coming from his trailer or his cackling. When a voice broke it I was momentarily terrified.

I looked up, no one there.

“It’s L,” the voice said, coming from the courts, the picnic table, “come over here and bullshit for a sec.”

I groped through the darkness and found L sitting on the undone hatch of his truck drinking beer. I sat and we talked for an hour, about a lot of things I won’t repeat here. They deal with other worlds, with the amazing gift his people have, of living on the land they came from, connected to the same elementally driven spiritual existence that bore their ancestors across the millenia.

He talked candidly about his personal situation, the state of permanent collapse within the tribe, the circles they all walk in, and as he grew more intoxicated, his meanderings grew more emotional and associative, his voice drew into longing, great stretches of memory: laying beneath trees, to the trek to his grandmother’s, to the web of familial connections that spread throughout everyone in the tribe.

The whole time we looked beyond the houses, the small yellow windows, at those great dark mountains rising over the reservation, the sky now bluish grey, and beyond them, ‘that’s where we come from,’ L said again and again, gesturing out there.

It was somber and cold and immediately after telling me about an incredible drunken home run his sister made in soft ball he changed directions entirely.

“Want you to know something,” he said, “the things you know, the things you’ve learned; we’ve taken you into our confidence here, but those things stay here.” He looked at me soberly: “it’s all we have left.”

He took my hand, something that doesn’t happen much down there, and shook it firmly.

I told him: “I’ll do that for you,” all the while, wondering what I’d written here and other places with the intent of helping people understand more clearly what it’s like in indian country, culturally and beyond. Have I told too much? I also wondered if he was serious or if this was the alcohol talking, the sadness of the social realities down there; that most of the traditional ways of living that governed his ancestors will soon be lost in a sea of fat women and teenagers acting like toddlers, as he said.

The reason for secrecy around these things put me off for a long time and I imagine that most readers of this blog might greet it with respect, as if for its quality of political correctness, but not for the value of it. We don’t have many sacred things if any and as such, I don't think we have the collective knowledge about how to respect them. Let's be honest, lots of us don't even believe in "sacred." We believe in "cultural experiences," but not only do we not believe them, we see them as living objects rather than methods for living.

“I don’t mean to talk bad about your people,” L said, “but you came and you took, you take things-when we want something, we ask for it.”

You won’t hear me talk much about these sorts of sacred things in here anymore. I’m beginning to realize why things stay hidden, why any projects created by the tribe need to stay within the tribe. For so long I was urgently pushing for a paradigm shift, to open things up, to teach the kids even though traditionally its the job of their parents. But when you shift a method of spiritually communicating with the land, how do you ensure that it retains its integrity.

“You look up our people in all those books, you won’t find nothing,” L said, “that’s because the Elders said and we always said, what is here stays here.”