Welcome to AMMSA.COM, the news archive website for our family of Indigenous news publications.

From One Raven's Eye

Author

wagamese...

Volume

4

Issue

7

Year

1986

Page 7

Hi, howdy and hello. Here is a little something two consenting readers can try, just to get you into the mood for this week's particular talk. It involves tying up. It involves darkness. Okay! Now take a scarf or a sterilized sock. Tie that like a blindfold around your partner's eyes. This is where the fun starts. You lead them around the room, steering them clear of furniture, napping uncles, acting as their eyes in other words. That was pretty easy eh? Now your partner gets to lead you around like that for awhile.

What did you feel like being guided around blind? What did you have to think about doing the leading part? In that actual lifeskills exercise to develop trust, you sort of get an idea how it sometimes feels to be in a leadership role on the rez, level these days. You can get a feel for how it can be led, especially if you get a fridge door in your teeth or strange, stickly material stuck to your trusting feet.

Ah yes, chief and council.. Not that long ago they used to give each chief a uniform. It sorta looked like a leftover mountie outfit with a big yellow stripe down the leg. These days they could easily give out uniforms to everybody sweating out decisions in band offices all across the country. Something just as cheap. Maybe sweatshirts with big red and white targets designs on the back of them.

If you spent any time on a reserve it isn't too long before you hear talk. "They're stealing all the money. They just hire their own relatives. The reserve is getting worse but they aren't doing anything about it. How come they don't put in oil like those other reserves have?"

In the two years I served on a band council we never ever had more than a half dozen band members attend a meeting at one time. We would have hired all of our cousins and second cousins on a full time basis to count all the money we made selling reserve land to hippies and nobody would've known about it for sure. As it was, we were honest and tried our best but that was just a rumor too.

So, why weren't the people showing up to be led, to take part in the making of decisions that affected them? Did chief and council make more house calls in the old days or what? Maybe the whole set up is wrong in the first place. If so, what can a reserve do to insure that the people trusted to lead it are doing the job?

What is leadership really anyway? How can we develop some to get us what we all need and want - a healthy, strong and satisfying place to raise our kids up in.

There was this reserve in northern Ontario that was going nowhere. One day, a person who had a hard life, drinking too much, getting thrown in and out of jail, losing his kids into care, all that, showed up back there sober and a whole lot older, at least in his eyes anyway. He borrowed a big red dump truck. The next day he and his family went around picking up all the garbage from people's weedy yards. He then dumped the whole smelly load right in front of the band office.

"What do you think you're doing?" the people shouted at him.

"This reserve is a big mess," he yelled back from out of the truck window. "This is just what it looks like when you look at the whole thing."

No they didn't make him the garbage man. When the next election came they voted him chief and things have been getting better around there as a result.

At another reserve, the kids, 6, 7, 8-year-olds, started sniffing gas. Sniffing kills brain cells. Some can grow back, many can not. Night after night, these young minds, young lives going up in fumes.

One summer the people in that place got together. They came up with a plan to deal with their situation. They put together a proposal and got the funds necessary to put their ideas into action. They went ahead and did everything on their own with no outside help at all. By themselves they put an end to that sniffing epidemic messing up the lives of their kids.

In each of these cases, leadership, the energy to make things happen on a community-wid level took place. One way was through the strength, vision and courage of one person. In his way, a born leader like Tecumseh, Pontiac, Poundmaker and Brant. Not too many of those types happen along. You can wait a deadly long time waiting for one to show up.

The other an idea, a perception amongst many people that something just had to be done. No one person can be pointed to as the leader.

In each case these people began thinking further than themselves, further than their own families, to the good of the people, the place and everybody in it. They begin to figure that if one person is having a hard time, then it's the other person's responsibility to help out if they can.

It seems that what we are talking here is a whole new old way of problem solving. An Aboriginal, tribal approach to living together. This includes how we go about making up our minds as a group, leadership in other words.

How that happens, what goes on inside each of us to get us thinking, doing, living like we used to, I don't know. Maybe the kind of leadership to get that started is some-how beyond the chief and councils kind. However, since politics is a human activity like any other, once you get strong leadership going, that's probably a sign that other good things are happening in the place as well.

Sometimes chief and council is like the blind folding leading the blindfolded.

Sometimes it's like the open eyed trying to herd around all those others who just refuse to see on their own. Why I have even heard rumors that in some places leadership is a case of a few walking where all the others, who can see just as thoughtful and well, tell them to. Sheesh, maybe we should go down to the next council meeting and check this out for ourselves. Maybe your place is where this rumor started from. If it isn't then maybe we should ask ourselves why.

Well that's it. You ever notice how sitting in dark place can affect your ability to think lightly. Let's all show some personal leadership and o find ourselves someplace where the sun can shine on our clouded up minds. See you all next week and oh yes, meegwetch, meegwetch, meegwetch.