Hello Ed,
Yeah, those guys are usually in the hiding bushes. There is a new
methodology called Indigenous Research. One book is "Research as Ceremony"
by Shawn Wilson. The stunner in that book is how many Native students are
found all over the world studying Systems Theory in great universities.
Shawn is a Canadian Indian studying in Australia.
The connection to Systems logic is in what Cherokees call "The Way of Right
Relationship" and is the foundation of our Spirituality flowing up into our
theories and methodology. John Warfield calls "Relationship Theories that
lead directly to human logic," the third Prior (out of four) necessary for a
mature science to evolve. The fourth Prior is the ability to Archive,
write and preserve. That's a tough one that has been argued for several
thousand years around the tendency of the human being to become more limited
in the ability to handle complexity as they develop the ability to read and
archive what is discovered.
The problem is that personally, once literate, they lose huge segments of
their memories and especially short term abilities to handle multiple
systems simultaneously. It makes absolute sense that the great physics
breakthroughs have been made when brains are young and still unaffected by
literacy. Literacy is a different wiring of the brain that gives us the
limitations noted by Miller and others, in the psychometrics testing field.
Such limitations have proven the need for the ISM programs ("Interpretive
Structural Modeling" ) that supplement the human limitation ("Magical
Number Seven") in group situations.
As for developing the human system for weak logic? Sports helps as does
playing the Organ, but the Western choice has been to invent machines that
will replace both the poor human short term memory and the logic behind it(
in large systems )to supplement human structural weaknesses. It is an
interesting observation that Griots from Africa do not read lest their
memory be lost. The same is true of the "special" children in many cultures
who are separated and instructed in memory before they can be polluted by
the written word. It's common for Foresters of the Native type to be good
at regular "civilized" academics. History is replete with great native
students in "White" universities doing just fine and often excelling. My
library is filled with such names because I don't want our children to lose
the sense of the value of their culture for what "Whites" claim to be a
superior methodology.
But the 'White" answer is never the forest as garden and teacher, but the
human/machine interface around human limitation and humility. The
problem in America and Canada has been the tendency of the Europeans, who
defined themselves as "White," to project such weakness off on to the
"Others" in their society when it was actually a human condition. Often
the Indigenous others were better at handling complexity (dense
competencies) due to the density of forest and jungle systems, than were
the urban dwellers whose systems were simplified, scaled and regulated.
It's an old Cherokee saying that the only control we have over our future is
where we choose to live.
REH
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 10:27 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract?
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I spent a few years working on land
claims with the Council for Yukon Indians. Only one of the aboriginal
people I worked with had a law degree, but all of them were bright and
competent, and in one case, extremely bright and competent. He should have
been teaching management at Harvard. When in one of our long and
complicated meetings we got totally stuck, he'd walk up to the whiteboard,
grab a pen, and tell us where we had got to. You're here now, he'd say, and
this is where you have to get to, and here are the possibilities of how you
get there. Pretty soon, the whiteboard had lines, boxes and notes on it
that made sense. When we'd gotten it, he'd sit down and the meeting would
proceed. If we got stuck again, he'd get up again, and keep moving us along
until we had resolved the issues we were dealing with. An extremely bright
young guy.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: michael gurstein <mailto:[email protected]>
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'
<mailto:[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 11:57 AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract?
Ray, I don't think there is a contradiction. Some communities, some
families, some individuals. what was surprising to me was the apparent
numbers of these young people. I already knew the depressing statistics that
Ed was pointing to (and that haven't changed all that much in the subsequent
20 years. or in my 30 years since I saw those conditions in Northern
Saskatchewan reserves and Metis communities.
M
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 7:16 AM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract?
Thanks Ed, how does that square with Mike G.'s view of the new generation of
Information savvy young people and the enlightened First Nation's officers?
Also, Rayna Green a Cherokee Anthropologist at the Smithsonian did a
cultural sketch of the whites in Vermont and New Hampshire and found pretty
much the same thing as you found amongst the First Nations Folks. Cabin
Fever, too much alcohol and too much time on their hands. She also found
a high suicide rate amongst the locals, especially during winter months.
Her comment was that when anyone is put into such a claustrophobic
situation, lied to and stolen blind with impunity the only thing to do is
drink or drugs until this hell is done.
REH
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 3:29 PM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract?
Ray asks when a contract is not a contract. Well, in my opinion, a contract
is always a contract. However, much depends on how it is administered and
whether there is a neutral authority looking over the shoulders of both
sides to ensure that they are giving and getting the deal that has been
agreed on. In the context of Canada's Native people, that authority, the
federal government, has been one of the parties to the contract and has been
in the position to manipulate carrying out the contract to its advantage.
It has not always been neutral in supervising the conduct of the contract.
As well, it has often been somewhat negligent in ensuring that the contract
did what it was supposed to.
About twenty years ago, I did a study of the ability of several Native
communities in our northern prairies to accept mining development. I spent
some time in several communities. Here's what I wrote on one of them:
A Symbiotic Community
Monday, July 13, 2009
Discussion of the problems of our aboriginal peoples with a friend prompted
me to look up something I wrote many years ago while working on a project in
the northern parts of one of the prairie provinces. The following is an
abridged version of what I wrote. I'd suggest that it applies to many of our
aboriginal communities.
Undoubtedly, the community had valid economic and social reasons for
existing at one time. During the fur and mission era, it serviced a largely
subsistence, partly commercial (fur trapping, commercial fishing, casual
labor) population that was widely dispersed on the land much of the time.
The descendants of that population were drawn into town by a series of
government requirements that were imposed mostly during the post WWII era:
the requirement that kids attend school regularly; that the school be in the
community; that health and hospital services be provided where people live
(which was turned around into the requirement that people live where the
health and hospital services are provided); that people be housed at
national and provincial standards for Indians, and that community physical
and service infrastructure exist to support that housing; that people be
conveniently located so that welfare and other forms of subsidy could be
administered to them; etc.
It has become a symbiotic community: All of the institutions have been
provided in a single place which in the administrative view is appropriate
to the population and that allows government institutions to provide their
services conveniently. The people, having lost their independence need the
institutions. But the institutions also need the people to justify their
existence in the community.
Socially, the population maintains many of the values and attitudes of its
land based culture. The people continue to try to be hunters, trappers,
fishers and foragers, though being those things while living in the
community full time is very difficult. So some of the land-based skills and
attitudes have been converted to skills that allow survival in town, with
foraging for money among the various bureaucracies being an especially
useful skill.
Such foraging makes economic sense, since the community has no industrial
base. The only real income base, now and in future, is government,
supplemented by occasional construction, some local business, some fishing,
etc.
Yet the money that the foragers obtain does not always make good sense
socially. Wives often see one purpose in money - feeding the family - but
husbands all too often see quite another - having a good time with their
friends. This often leads to family violence.
The government institutions which service the community are there not only
to support and service the population, they are there to change it. They are
not really support services in the sense of helping people achieve their own
aspirations, they are coercive agents of social change - social engineers.
When they put some of the administration of programs into local hands, they
nevertheless maintain tight control to ensure that it is their objectives
and not those of the local people that are met.
The outcome has been a disruption and fragmentation of the community. Many
people buy into the institutionally driven values, attitudes and actions,
and the old ways get pushed into the background. The elders remain respected
as custodians of old memories, but in reality wield little influence. They
have taken on the roles of cultural icons, not much more.
Ed
_____
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
