LG band room rocks again

I have agreed to continue for the 2022-23 school year teaching band and vocal music at Lodge Grass, a small Crow Indian town isolated in Southern Montana at the north foot of the Big Horn Mountains. The agreement is simple. Since I am to be age 80 in just a few months, I promise to continue, as long as I can have enough fun with young people having fun with music to keep my old bones moving with their music drowning out my creaking joints.

LG band room rocks again. 

I started with beginners with real band instruments the end of February.  By April nearly everyone had three notes down, and many had five.  With drummers and the band learning under my interpretation of the Suzuki method–a little more complex than rote learning–students were able to learn by reading instrument positions, hearing, and imitating hand positions in time with breath.  Three of our senses are at work synchronizing auditory, kinesthetic, and visual data simultaneously. Yes, I play along.

For 8th grade graduation last May we successfully played Eye of the Tiger. We did the 3-against-4 rhythm highlighted by drummers and picked up by the lead players.  Students did it all

So I had fun with students grades 4 - 8 last spring semester, and starting this fall have high school band and choir added to the schedule. It will be fun seeing and hearing the LG band room rock again.

Some people don’t want some people to vote

 

In Southern Montana, not many of us want voter suppression. In Arizona, the portion may be larger. Here though, we have a strong consensus on voting rights. We honor the American way of voting, with ballots more respected than bullets. It’s a problem when our governor and two of our congressmen succumb to the wave of hundreds of Republican-sponsored voter-suppression bills. Governor Gianforte set a dangerous one before our legislature, and it passed. We want citizens in Big Horn County to keep the right to vote here clean; we should not tolerate anti-American nonsense in Montana. We are grateful for Janette Rankin, and proud that her legacy has continued with voting rights advocacy by Dr. Janine Pease of Little Big Horn College. Arizona may have worse problems with voter suppression. But let’s not gloat.

 

On a sunny morning in the 1980’s I was leading a workshop in a small Catholic mission town on the Tohono Oʼodham nation which straddles the southern border with Mexico. I was speaking to a group of a dozen or more clergy and musicians working in Christian ministry on Indian reservations in the West. We were gathered with a few local participants in shade under a palm tree in the center of the walled enclave with the Catholic mission church. 

 

Our quiet proceedings were interrupted by a tremendous explosion. It was followed immediately by a second explosion. Some of us in panic threw ourselves to the ground. I got up and ran to a wall, feeling the shaking of jet engines blasting. My ears were ringing so I could barely hear, but as I climbed a stairway and looked toward the sound, I saw clearly two dark blue delta-wing fighter planes climbing straight up. They then curved away over upside down, twisted right side up and flew away in formation.  

 

Our hosts told me and the others to go on with the meeting. It’s something that happens unpredictably, they said, and it was over for at least the day. It took a while to calm our nerves and continue working on our agenda.

 

I had earlier gotten acquainted with a janitor who sat in our meetings.  During our lunch break I went to him and asked where the planes had come from. He said they were from the Navy base over by Kitt Peak. In the following week I researched and found this was most likely a practice atomic bombing run to fly at supersonic speed low toward a target, set the plane into a steep climbing loop while precisely releasing the bomb to arc up and over like a hail Mary pass. Then the plane would be miles away to protect from radiation released.  If not just practice, the bomb would have exploded as timed just above the ground.

 

But it wasn’t “just practice” to American citizens there. My janitor friend said the sonic boom caused their sheep to abort, windows to be broken, and many people to move away from the town being targeted for practice atomic bombing by the United States Navy. I asked about the size of the town’s sheep herd. He said it was less than half what it was before the practice bombing runs began.

 

He said there would be a council meeting that afternoon. I asked for and was given permission to speak with a member at break time. It turned out to be the chairman.  I offered to tell our Montana Senator Baucus when I returned to Montana in two days about what I had experienced. I said I was sure our Senator would stop this military practice activity against this real town. His response was, “No!  Please, please do not inform anyone in the government. After many decades of trying, we have finally just recently been given the right to vote.  If you speak to your senator we could lose our voting rights again.”

 

I felt ashamed of my country. This is America, where we have the best, most reliable voting record of any nation. It’s led by honest, reliable citizens right here in our small towns too. They happen to be mostly Republican, and the kind of people who should be leading the GOP now.

The boy raised by a bird

 

This young man in the picture moved into our daughter's house next to ours about a year ago. Recently our family celebrated his graduation from high school, and from Montana Youth Challenge Academy (MYCA). This is a summary of the true story I related there.

The "banty" hen he is holding was hatched by her mother very late in the summer, risking survival into the coming winter. Last October her clutch of chicks were barely strong enough to fly up to roost beside their mother. They still lacked normal winter feather protection. We were hit with sudden record cold. Her chicks struggled to stay under her wings on their roost.  But they suffered frost bite on feet and legs. We found them frozen on the frosty grass in the morning. This was the only one to survive, because of this young man.

He happened to be outdoors, and saw the little birds. He picked up the one chick with signs of life, with curled feet from freeze damage so could not walk.  My daughter helped him get anti-infection medicine. He built a snug little nest for her in a cardboard box lined with soft grass. His gentle hands and voice were answered with contented chick chirps. The bird stayed with him in his bedroom through December, where the long winter's cold could not reach. With food, water, and surrogate bird mothering, the chick grew. The family took over when he won a scholarship to attend a semester of Montana Youth Challenge Academy. I took the picture the day of our celebration of his graduation, just after he was reunited with his little lame bird.

I first met the boy in early elementary school, in my music classroom. I remember him as one his teacher said would certainly cause trouble if allowed to be with the other children. Normally I encouraged such a "discipline problem" to sit by me in the music circle. He remembered my class as one where he felt safe while with the other children, with whom he usually felt unsafe.

He was born into a troubled family. Near the time he first came to the school where I taught,  his parents were both killed in an auto crash. He was taken in by a grandparent, and then by an uncle, all of whom died prior to my family deciding to give him a place. He is now our informally adopted grandson, graduated from high school and has job interviews in Billings this week. But we didn't heal him.

In an environment with many risks for children in our county, and for chicks on our farm land, it's good to see good happening with empowerment from unexpected weak resources. Sometimes the best discipline and growth is learned when those of us older and wiser exercise nothing more than our presence.

 

Dave Drove in the Ditch

 

Restoring the foundation of academic excellence in US schools

 

Of all the components of the executive function of the mind, one stands out crucial for children to learn: self-regulation. This is built primarily by imitation in trusted relationships, where emotional control and collective action are learned in meeting a common need. Since creation, this mental function built strong families, tribes, and nations. High rates of incarceration in the United States today reflects children's growth with deficiencies in this essential brain function. It’s at the core of brain development needed for academics, and for human life itself.

 

In the early 40’s, military psychologists were concerned about this capacity among recruits. They designed a simple test of self-regulation to be given children, to predict fitness for platoon loyalty. The test was repeated a few years ago, and researchers compared the results with those of the 1940’s. They found that 5-year-olds today are about where 3-year-olds were in the 40’s, in self-regulation.

 

It’s remarkable that this function among our young has been declining in our nation. Why? Is it that we have progressively dismantled engagement with real life risks among our youth since the last century? Ask any old farmer around in the 4-score age range if he remembers riding a bus to high school. Were students driving his bus then? I can testify, that was the dominant practice in rural America in the 50’s (look up The Mountaineer, “Student Bus Drivers”). 

 

After school, in a rainstorm April of 1960, mud splattered my windshield from the vehicle ahead as the rain joined in with wipers opening a smeared patch to see the mud on the road ahead. Visibility opened just enough to cause me panic. Looming at me and my bus, a cement truck was taking the middle of the road. I slowed and moved as near the grass ditch as I dared. The truck passed within inches. I took a breath and set the steering wheel to aim back to the solid crown of slick mud in the center. I slowly engaged the clutch. What I dreaded happened. Instead of moving forward, all six wheels slid for the ditch. I clutched, the rear wheels stopped turning, but it was too late. The entire bus lazily tipped at a crazy angle, and gently stopped.  I’m sure I joined in with the screams of some thirty high school students behind my driver’s seat.

 

The screams morphed into teasing as it was clear the only outcome was the crazy angle of the bus the cradled in the grassy shallow ditch: “Dave drove in the ditch, Dave drove in the ditch!” The chant rose from the back of the bus and quickly became hilarious.  I don’t remember who said it first, might have been me. “Well, come on, lets push it out!” Everyone clambered out the rear door of the bus, since the front door was jammed against the grass. We took off our shoes, dug our toenails into the grass for grip, and started a rhythmic rocking of the whole huge bus. We could rock it! “If we can rock it, we can move it,” was my thought, as driverless, the bus started creeping. I was just about to jump back in the driver’s seat and start it up….

 

It was a November day in 1959 that our student bus driver, Rich, got a citation driving his car. He could no longer legally drive the route. My dad reminded me that we lived at the end of the route, and I might be appointed to drive. I was. In a week I passed the test for a chauffer’s license (no CDL then), and began driving the bus to school every day, arriving home in time for chores. There was no “adult” on the bus, ever that I remember. We were expected to self-regulate, and generally did well. This was an exception.

 

He was on the bus, probably started the chant to embarrass me. I know he joined in rocking the bus. As it became clear we could actually push the bus, either me or another student shouted, “Let Rich drive it out.” Anyway, he was the one who got under the wheel, started it creeping forward as our rocking kept rear wheels alternately gripping the grass and the strip of gravel at the road edge as the bus started in motion.

 

Rich drove it back onto the road, and teasingly took off, but stopped so we could climb in.   I was back in the driver’s seat less than 15 minutes after we hit the ditch, and we were on the road home. I don’t remember telling anyone about this until writing it this week. The remarkable thing then was not that high school upper class students drove bus routes in rural America then. No, that was normal, as far as I know. The remarkable thing was that we, all the students on that bus when the need was obvious, jumped out into the mud to rock it into motion and get it back on the road.

 

When will we return to seeking mutual benefit with teenagers in useful risk-taking, and transcend the litigious culture that has arisen around our schooling in Montana and America?

Disposable human beings

 Disposable human beings:

How politics of pro-life turned against the American family

 

I, along with nearly every American citizen, am against abortion. But we need a different kind of talk. Recent political debates regarding whose lives are disposable and whose lives are to be more valued have been raging. The abortion issue in our nation and right here in Montana remains prominent. Government biases prioritizing some human lives over others is against our Constitution and our common sense. Yet the value of respect for life for human beings from conception to 3-score-and-10 is Constitutional and Biblical. look up “neither Jew nor Greek,” or “all nations.”

 

Some of us opposed to abortion want protection for the totality of human life regardless of political differences. Others of us, and many in Southern Montana, want to parse this out and end up exacerbating illicit demand for abortions. Recent nation-wide legislation banning abortion further removes families’ power, endowed by the Creator, to protect their own. This writing is in support of those who take seriously the Bible’s respect for family relationships over government intervention to protect the unborn. 

 

I remember well a scene in my childhood when I threw a fit. I was outraged because all my childhood senses were obsessed with the immediate scene.

 

My grandmother picked me up and stood me on a stool beside her at a table in the barn. I was to help scrape sheep guts clean. Being a kid in a sheep-shearing family, I already had nasal passage revulsion fits if detecting sheep odors. I saw, smelled and felt the slick slimy goo my grandmother was removing and washing from each length of sheep gut. She forced into my hand a table knife, not too sharp so I wouldn’t easily nick the gut skin. She placed my hand with hers on a length of gut to press against the board, and told me to hold it down. Then she moved my knife hand to scrape the gut clean. I revolted, and cried for my mother. Mother told me to do what Grandma says. I was abandoned. I protested that I was going to puke. Grandmother brought the slop bucket of entrail washings and set it beside my stool for me to puke in if I needed. I ended up obedient. I watched my fingers push the goo oozing from the edge of my knife blade while holding the stretched out gut over the table board, and getting something done. I did not puke. I did not hear grandmother say, “there you got it,” but I’m confident she did.  

 

Later that day I recovered enough to gather with my cousins to watch “the sausage snake.” Uncle Willis ladled spiced, good-smelling ground meat into the press cylinder, clamped the screw motor over the piston, started it turning and smashing down the sausage grindings. We watched transfixed as a snake of ground sausage pushed into a tube fastened to the output at the bottom of the press. The motor chugged, the tube of sausage casing grew longer, and Uncle Willis struggled to keep the snake from kinking.

 

He missed a kink. The casing burst. He quickly stopped the motor, made a snide comment about dapich (clumsy) kids cutting holes in the casing. He carefully gathered up each tiny morsel of the spilled ground meat. He reached into a tub for something familiar to me: sheep gut like I had been cleaning. He cut two short lengths, twisted each of them into a twine, and used it to tie each of the two ends of broken casing.  In no time he started the motor. He then kept filling a series of tubs, one for a year’s supply of sausage for each of ten households in my extended family.

 

Maybe it’s time now to back up from asking big government protection of one unborn child at a time. Maybe it’s better to look at the larger picture God designed for us in families, clans, tribes and nations. We need to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, touch with our hands, and even maybe smell, in order to imagine a better way. I don’t remember anyone telling me I had a role to play in my family’s needs for food. It was there, and respected. In time, a long time, I became aware of the value of the connections my traditions built.  At the time, I had no idea each November family butchering event was in itself sacred. Our religion supported us with thanksgiving for divine blessing, and generosity to share. I didn’t get the bigger picture.

 

Government take-over of the protective function God ordained for the family has left us in the United States with a mess of more abortions, more dysfunction and early death. Children suffer trauma born into households where government anti-abortion is just one way parents are branded disposable or unfit to protect their own. The consequences are huge in schools, prisons, crime rates, policing practices, illness, and early death.

 

THIS ENDING?

We in the United States did that in past generations.  In fact, most of our nation’s existence provided legal protection for slavery.  Are we still in mental slavery? My grandmother didn’t intend this, but was she, and was my experience as a child, part of our American culture of slavery blocking me from seeing and her from saying I belonged? Or was my fogged vision, not seeing my importance to what my family needed, simply an aversion to smelling and handling sheep guts?

 

OR THIS ENDING?

We might agree that even just one child growing up marginalized for interventionist profit, prison profit, and any consequence like suspension and expulsion is too many. Our sense of what’s good for our families and neighbors of any race, age, or gender was not meant to be taken over and protected by judicial force outside the family, neither in our Constitution, nor in our Bible, nor in any of the heritages of family life and languages here in Southern Montana. This writing is an invitation for an evidence-based conversation on better roles for judicial processes affecting those leading our families, schools, county, state, and leaders of our great nation. What might it mean to return to the Biblical basics of family? Let’s talk about it. 

The Good Mandate

The Bible is clear.  We are to love our neighbors as ourselves. Is the political fall-out of the mask mandate across the nation and even here in Big Horn County now morphing into a vaccination mandate? Is there a godly way to national recovery from covid-19? What mandate helped us past the carnage of unregulated car travel on primitive dirt roadways in the 30’s?

 

Our governor has pushed a bill forbidding Montana colleges, business places, county governments, and other facilities to set vaccination mandates for public access. Meantime, President Biden and mostly Democratic supporters are promoting the opposite. They say we can only achieve herd immunity with a national covid vaccination mandate. Should local public enterprises and service agencies be allowed to require vaccination evidence for access to their facilities? Our governor says no. Is that a good mandate?

 

It’s a good time to mull over another nation-wide mandate mounting up over the past four generations. I remember my father’s story from the time car travel was totally unregulated.  

 

It was a sunny noon midsummer, 1937. Sunday dinner came at noon after church, and my father-to-be was with family outside under a shade tree. Suddenly a strong distant explosion intervened. They quickly determined the source. It turned out two Burlington Route trains suffered a horrific collision, nearly four miles away. All three of his brothers and two cousins piled into their model-A Roadster and struck out full bore on the dirt road toward the sound they had heard.  Soon the ambulane sirens in the distance confirmed their vector, and the main road–equivalent to a ranch trail here–was crowded with then-new vintage cars in a traffic jam. The wildest of the reckless cousins, Melbourne, at the wheel, pulled out to pass a line of jammed cars.  Weeds hid a washout. The speed factor colluded. The left front wheel dropped, stopped instantly, and the rest flipped a cartwheel. Everyone was airborne. Miraculously, all flew clear of the car. My father-to-be, previously piled on top 3-deep in the rumble seat, flew farthest away into deep grass.  Others landed on rocks. He was the only one not bleeding, and all survived though badly battered.

 

The next day, Monday, was road grading day. My father-to-be hitched his team to the farm road grader for family-assigned road maintenance. It was a routine. Undiagnosed then was a cracked skull and internal bleeding. His unconscious body returned slumped in the grader seat behind the patient team of horse, dragging their reigns, still hitched to the grader. He was rushed to the hospital.

 

He spent fourteen days mostly unconscious before he began to revive. But his mind was changed. His fiancée soon realized he was not the person she had decided to marry, and soon broke off the engagement. Two years later he met and married my mother.

 

Most important, my father-to-be survived a nation-wide scourge of traffic deaths, leading to useful mandates for car travel now in place for generations.  Unnecessary lives had been lost on our primitive roads then.  But we the people, all of us, through access we have in our constitution, intervened. We did so via the federal government intervention, then community health in local locations all across our nation. It saved many lives. It does so to this day,

 

Let’s demand our governor learn the history of one kind community health mandate now in place for generations. We have these freedoms because our federal government, acting on our behalf, supported states and local governments to mandate transparency, regulations, and our respect for our neighbors’ very lives.  Our Helena officials have no business legislating mandates against local community health mandates, especially the well-researched, evidence-based practices our federal agencies have recommended. That’s how our nation did it, for generations, with our Montana state and county highway and traffic laws. Now, with covid regulations and mandates about as primitive as car travel mandates then, we have work to do. Our governor should join with us the citizens of Montana supporting the good of all of us. This means community health mandates and regulations not unlike our regulated rights to drive cars.

 

A Pew poll last week found 48% of conservative white Christians consider community health effects “a lot” when deciding whether to get covid vaccine. In contrast, 65% of Catholics, 68% of unaffiliated Americans, and 70% of Black Protestants cited community health first. I hope we in Southern Montana are better aligned with Jesus’ mandate to our neighbor in his “Greatest Commandment.”

 

 

Shaking the Pillars of American Democracy

 

I’m so thankful we are not China.

 

Unlike in Chairman Mao’s reign of 1966-1976, we have a democracy upheld by three co-equal pillars of our government. The truth-finding power (judicial branch) is separated from the law-enforcement power (executive branch) and the law-making power (legislative branch). Truth is not a matter of opinion, bias, or preference which can be manipulated to serve tyranny. Truth must be based on legal evidence subject to scrutiny. A few months ago, from lower courts up to U.S. Supreme Court, allegations of fraud in our democracy were found to be meritless at best. At worst, they remain a conspiracy to remove power from local officials in counties and states, to silence the voice of the people, and to give power to outsiders to determine whether or not an election is rigged. This is the worst of Chinese communist ideology. It doesn’t belong here.

 

“I’m here for your help, Mr. David,” spoke a well-dressed man at my door at XiHua University, near Chengdu, Sichuan, China, winter of 2002.  China’s federal government had directed university attorneys in constitutional law to contribute chapters to a legal policy document required for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). He, the lead attorney on our campus, was assigned to submit his writing on capital punishment. He had called earlier to set up an appointment, and had emailed me his document to peruse.

 

We sat down and progressed through the “Chinglish” elements I had highlighted. He was cordial and articulate. We began contrasting the American trial-by-jury with China’s trial-by-judges, as applicable to various capital crimes. I had studied the standards applying to sedition, speech against government, as prohibited in China.  I saw a huge hole allowing powerful officials to condemn critical speech, a capital crime there.  To my non-legal mind, his writing on sedition left evidence standards broad enough to drive a truck through. I told him this. He launched into a speech on why trial-by-jury could never work in China because peasants cannot understand evidence.  He said “It’s possible this works in America, but never in China. Jurists who have the lives of citizens in their hands cannot be common people here.” I was shocked. So only the powerful have the right to determine what is true, even the right to continue living.

 

I could understand some of where he was coming from. He divulged his opinion that up to 40 million people perished as a result of China’s “Cultural Revolution” That holocaust was fed by Chairman Mao’s big lie: “Counter-revolutionaries are everywhere around us, even in families; they have secret thoughts against me! They must be rooted out and eliminated!” (see documentation in Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang, friend of a professor friend of mine at XiHua University) Families were divided against families, children against elders, parents against children. Out of loyalty to their leader, they betrayed each other to be tried, sent to forced labor, and even executed as enemies of Mao’s revolution. 

 

Later that spring, we strolled off-campus with a half dozen students to find and visit a farm family. An elderly couple was home. We were cordially received, and our students talked at length with them. Three of us were invited into the farmer’s bedroom to see his most prized possession. It was a solid silver etching of a stern, life-size Chairman Mao, peering down above the farmer’s bed.  I knew my students were schooled in the new “Deng Xiao Ping” thoughts on democracy in China, rejecting Chairman Mao’s thought control. I heard a bit of tension in their voices. They explained to me later that this farmer could not possibly abandon his loyalty to Chairman Mao, because it was a religion to him. 

 

Elderly farmers continue to admire Mao today, even though they suffered under his oppression. Mao had set up production incentives for farmers in that county to prove the success of his authoritarian communism. Facing food shortages, farmers fudged their production data to win needed provisions. They easily exaggerated production rates. But this determined the following year’s taxes: in bags of rice. Officials cleaned out farm commune granaries, far exceeding their acreage capacity, because they falsely inflated their production the year before. He said the farm population of those who died in Sichuan from starvation exceeded counter-revolutionary executions. I asked, “How many total across China died?” He said it was more like 40 million lives lost during Mao’s reign. Yet decades later, loyalty to then the world’s greatest liar remained strong.  

 

Maybe it connects with Montana Republican politicians who still succumb to our former president’s lies.  He repeatedly cited twisted evidence of “massive fraud” on social media, echoed by political pundits who are not legally required to present truth. Fox News lawyers argued in court that “no reasonable viewer of ordinary  intelligence” would expect Tucker Carlson to tell the truth, even after saying, “Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.”(McDougal v. Fox News, 2020). The facts he cited were not facts. They were easily disputed, and he knew so at the time. With a lie carefully cultivated by a respected FOX commentator, and repeated often enough and widely enough, even our Montana leadership refused to speak the true evidence they also knew. 

 

Republicans can save us. They are just now beginning to question what remained unquestioned in this farmer’s mind on Chairman Mao. Our nation needs free elections.  Remember the thin blue line of Capitol police, who stood in protection of the true pillars of our democracy back in January 6? And some gave their lives? It can inspire a return of the Republican party to the values of our nation. 

 

Fortunately, corporate losses from our media lies are large. Lawsuits are looming against right-wing mistakenly-labeled “conservative” media giants refusing to come clean from, for example, falsely discrediting the voting machine reliability in Georgia. It was Republicans, grounded in our government’s judicial pillar of democracy, who began strengthening our pillars in Georgia. May truth spread among us, and may confidence in our American democracy return here in Montana as well.

A Covid Blessing

It doesn't make sense but it's true. Families are working together, eating together, preparing meals, cooking, cleaning, and taking in family members who lost their place to spend the night. I’ve been watching the children. Many are getting into the healing happiness of the covid blessing. We can heal with them.

 

Of course, the increase of interaction with family members can bring out the worst too. Many of us are bothered with so much relationship stuff.  We live in a culture that has demeaned family work to meet physical needs. It’s why we like school cafeterias, fast food, and propane deliveries. Now more of us are finding ourselves close to fires we build together, and rebuilding broken relationships is not easy. We are accustomed to easily walking away from the circle when the going gets tough, and conflicts rear up.  And now with covid still around, that’s more difficult, and more dangerous.  So many of us are swept into a family circle. Is it broken? Can Covid turn out to be a catalyst for healing?

 

Our collective memories have lost power to hold intact the ancient circle of Apsaalooke, German, Irish, Mexican, Asian and more heritages that once functioned here. They once kept our families together for the good of all. The power of the circle once was there because it included everyone. Not just because we would feel guilty sending anyone away, but because we were needed to keep our real needs met. Everyone had a role in some of everyone’s needs. And it was not only physical needs. It’s our need to be needed. And our need for emotional, spiritual, physical, and social connection.

 

A friend of mine had a brother who was incapacitated in his youth.  The tragedies led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Father, grandfather, and the two brothers took up a challenge to be helicoptered into the remote wilderness in the North Canadian shield. It was weeks walking distance from the planned point of access to safety. They prepared carefully for the risks, gathering equipment and tools for an extended time. They were conscious their need for each other would far outweigh the possibility of anyone being “on my own” during this expedition.  And that itself was scary. The risks were high of being together in a family fraught with trauma, even ancestral trauma. A family history of conflicts in relationship does not make such a venture easy to enter. To make a long story short, by the last week of the venture his symptoms were gone.

 

In “civilized” America, more of us than ever before can choose to survive on our own. It’s not easy to see interdependency as useful. We seem to have a culture built on easy escape from distasteful or even violent symptoms of trauma still engrained in our family system, from back when escape was not easy as it is now.

 

And now, covid has been putting children together with their elder relatives in ways that demand their loyalty and care for one another. I’ve heard it’s happening: the gift of covid.

 

For how many of us is this a terrible twist of covid fate? Can it be turned into the blessing the Creator may have intended?  Many of us, with ancestral trauma history, have difficulty opening our minds to this. Family dysfunction has become normal, as well as the normal ease to escape to another state. Now that escape isn’t so easy, we maybe could benefit together from a well-designed free program to heal together.  First see or read the story: thetraumatizedbrain.com/the-legacy-of-hollow-water .

Then look up hidden water, the new healing way built on science supporting what happened with Hollow Water: https://hiddenwatercircle.org/origin-story.

 

Or better yet, contact your local behavioral health provider, and ask for a human systems approach.

 

Might this be a way for the convergence of covid tragedies here with the Creator’s way to recapture the hope we once had in each of our ancestral pasts? Can all the varieties of heritages, languages, and religions here be an asset for healing?

Heart learning reposted revised

Fall of 1973, I walked into the new tribal school in  Busby ready to teach music.  Soon, I was discouraged. My students weren't listening or following my directions. They seemed resistant to learning. Worse, parents didn't seem to care about compliance; some actually seemed to value rebellion, offending my German ideals of child discipline. I shared my frustration with my trusted friend, a Cheyenne elder and grandfather of several of my students, and he turned my perceptions upside-down. The Cheyenne, he explained, enjoy seeing children physically active, not sitting down, holding still, being quiet. Adults pay attention to children, and children are expected to pay attention to adults. It builds respect. Children learn through games, dance, song, and stories--real life events. I didn't notice that resisting my demands for their attention showed strong heart, grit and courage. It took me a long time to see heart-learning as the foundation of education, not as a distraction or rebellion to be overcome. 

 

Outstanding new scientific research into effective education for life supports ancient wisdom. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL, or CASEL) in Montana's current standards and teacher training has made amazing progress back to the foundations for early learning, but progress is difficult in changing toward better systems in Montana. Under current benchmarks and resultant disempowerment of child upbringing accountability to the child’s circle, the very reasons for writing the standards remain unfulfilled. Our achievement gap, and quality of family life measures, remain unchanged.

 

Many programs outside Montana get it better, like Circle of Security International, Escuela Nueva Foundation (their “learning circle” program”), and the “phonemenon-based” learning promoted it Finland. It’s time for Montana’s early childhood programs to allow at least one alternative parallel path to credentialing of family, school, and individual caregivers through programs like the Association for Child Development (ACD) or the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Many states have at least one now. 

 

LifeWays North America is being used in one preschool in Montana, in Red Lodge. Here children and their parents/caregivers are empowered to teach and to learn. Instead of initiating instruction, teacher learns and designs structure and scaffolding to invite children’s collaboration across ages with the whole heart, hands, body, and mind. Cognitive engagement is often not verbally directed by the teacher. Children are engaged with real stuff, with each other and with the teacher verbally and non-verbally with age-old normal rhythms of quiet play, food preparation, story sharing, eating, cleanup, rest, celebration, with songs and circle time activities at transition points in each day and through the week. The child can fail and try again, and learn trust of the teacher to collaborate with others, go exploring with full release of the caregiver, and full confidence the caregiver will be there when needed. Instead of unnatural age stratification of children, focus of Lifeways pre-schools is for -birth to age 6 or 7, a cross-age rainbow in the school that easily builds social and emotional learning with a caregiver trained in one of these ways.

 

It reduces teacher preparation load because it empowers the child. If a child’s heart learning foundation is applied to teacher education, lesson planning will be more the child’s job in collaboration with others across ages and generations. Teachers have rewarding community connections in heritage practices of food, shelter, celebration, space, and spirituality to their learning circle. Worry of meeting academic outcomes is replaced by ways of learning proven more effective even academically in later school years.

 

A 7th grade math teacher Finland was asked, “what is an important measure of success in your students, since you don’t have standardized tests?” He replied, “I want to know if my students are having fun. The rest then is easy.” Fear-based external mandates by outsiders are counterproductive to restoring the ancient learning ways of life. Many educators trained now as evaluators can be trained in building bags and boxes of materials and practices that work with the old ways of handling heritage life ways. Our emphasis on benchmarks and evaluation schemata with lists to check-off to determine accountability has been undermining acquisition of the very skills the lists were meant to measure. Any process of accountability with the child and that child’s expanding learning circle from birth is the right accountability. Any process that undermines this circle’s agency to explore, learn, and evaluate, needs to be questioned. The standards themselves are more useful when applied and owned in the child’s circle of family and teacher.

 

Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies (CSRP) can be found in workshop sessions offered by organizations like LifeWays North America, at the Lakota Waldorf School in Kyle, South Dakota, and the indigenous pedagogy research in Canada, reveal many good options. These and other organizations are practicing heart learning in schools and preschools with success.   Heart learning can recover our Creator-intended learning systems and turn right-side-up our schooling and child rearing priorities here too. Join us in finding funding for an alternative learning program here.

For profit prisons returning public?

It’s true private prisons tend to have more violence, less public oversight, and poorer outcomes in recidivism. And it’s true that money for building the burgeoning private prison industry was raised in taxes.  Yes, even the facility here in Hardin, now back in government hands with more transparent regulations, began as a private investment for profit, on taxpayer money. Now even the Koch brothers’ stock options in private prisons for profit are losing (BuyUpSide: current percent return is -44.75%). It’s amazing, with all that cheap absentee-proof labor, we now have more Blacks in our nation than were freed by President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation over a hundred years ago. President Biden is right to take this step.

 

But it’s a small step toward a fair, transparent, and far more cost effective criminal justice system. Let’s go on toward the evidence and wisdom of science, along with a few local elders who still know why the original nations of North America generally did not need or want a prison system.

 

Most of us born into the dominant culture still believe in consequences to control children from making wrong choices. I was raised in a family strongly believing that children (like me) need quick consequences early in life to learn to make right choices. We believe children will turn out good because we intervene with consequences, and punishment if necessary, for bad behavior.  Some still don’t turn out good. Too many in America, especially in Big Horn County.  That’s normal.  Or is it?

 

Sciences of human behavior, child development, and of brain studies give evidence otherwise.  Alternative paths are more effective in building the brain’s executive function, contributing to internal discipline valuing connection with trusted human beings,  not from fear of separation from those we hope love us. We need light to shine on our false faith in fear of forced breakup of families. This is not a long-term effective motivation to behave appropriately in society. Here in Big Horn County that’s what many of us unkowningly think. How many elders still with us know otherwise by experience? We have them right here among us. These practices of science-based alternatives to punishment exist even in igloos.  

 

At age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out on the tundra for 17 months, with a family of the Inuit nation.  She chose to do this to understand the astounding discipline, even with young children, to control outrage and anger. In her time there, she was often chagrined with her own habits of expressing irritation, not uncommon in such close quarters in winter igloos. She wondered how children, from early years up, learned to hold disappointment and anger in check. Look up “Inuit parents teach kids control anger,” or check out her book,  Never in Anger. After 17 months she was still left with a lingering question: How do Inuit parents instill this ability in their children? How do the Inuit take tantrum-prone toddlers and turn them into cool-headed adults? The answer came this way: She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her toddler — a little boy about 2 years old. The child had been throwing rocks at the other children. The mom succeeded in distracting the child, taking the child to another area to play away from the others.  There she picked up a rock, gave it to her son, and said, "'Hit me!” The child did, and Briggs noticed he had no remorse.  She said  “Go on. Hit me harder,'" Briggs remembered the child finally harming her mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!" After repetitions, the child stopped, and refused to keep throwing rocks. Mom asked the child why. The answer, as the child came close, into her arms, was  “Mamma!”

 

Our national defiance of behavioral science reveals itself with a quick look.  Here we are, the richest nation on earth, with arguably the strongest tradition of democracy. Yet we have one of the highest per capita incarceration rates. We are not the nation of law and order we think we are. A popular congressperson last week was publicly promoting the assassination of another congressperson. A gallows and noose were brought to the door of the Capitol to the death-threat chants of a lynch mob, dead set on breaking in and trashing our Capitol.

 

Such language spoken by supposedly patriotic leaders opens a possible charge of felony assault. But what happened? Representative Greene’s threats were reinforced with gifts from her constituency of  $1.7 million. A federal government elected official came out west last week to recruit us to bring “Washington DC to its knees.” How can we have government officials shouting insurrection against the Capitol we the People of the United States occupy? it’s ours, not his personal possession. It cannot be brought to its knees without bringing us to our knees.  That’s what a tyrant, a dictator does. It happened just last weekend in Myanmar. Recent tyrants success in Egypt, The Philipines, and Russia are entrenched. We don’t want that here again. That’s what our revolution repudiated, in 1776.

 

We’ll win again. Many around us, yes this writer included, looked into this mess attracted to the raucous humor then led by President Trump with great profit.  But this has gotten out of hand in a murderous way. We are fortunate to have bipartisan strength in the Mountain West to just say no to this rampage of irresponsible outrage. Those of us who lived through the civil right struggle in the South in the 60’s know the danger of humoring of evil thinking.  Those of us read our Bibles know Jesus knew this too. It’s a question of what’s true, righteous, and of good report. This unpatriotic thinking, regardless of the fun, has run its course.

 

We cannot simply stop the deeply entrenched retributive justice system we have in our nation.  But we can start to relearn the more conservative, traditional, older ways of raising children with strong discipline. Here in Southern Montana we have heritages with better traditions of discipline. We also have one of the highest incarceration rates among folks who started to school in our rural counties.  It takes an enormous amount of healing work, and needs the support of professionals to access strong evidence-based practices outside the current retributive justice framework.  It also needs our legistators’ support to put taxpayer money into the cost-effective outcomes-based restorative justice framework. There are amazing studies of this in our state and around the world.  

 

It’s a small step for America on a long journey to turn around the worldwide rise in authoritarianism and tyranny. It’s wise to stop our burgeoning private enterprise that has been hiding evidence of unlawful, abusive, and criminal practices against children and their families. Voices from those suffering abuse have filtered past the blocks of evidence of inhuman practices for profit. We are fortunate for this, and this small step toward transparency and human decency. It’s especially important here in Big Horn County, with a history of high incarceration rates among those who started school here. Our president made a wise choice to end the feeding of our taxpayer funds into incarceration for profit. Now we are on a path toward reducing taxpayer costs for incarceration, toward rebuilding our family relationships on our heritages and sciences of child upbringing, and toward a nation willing to address the real voices of despair in every outrage epidemic by isolating the truths emerging from the flood of misinformation and outright lies. We shall overcome.  Black lives matter, along with all of our lives, especially those of our children.

 

Resources:

"The New American Slavery" MA thesis by David Liburd, cuny.edu

1.     Many books by and about Dr. Martin Luther King, search with the words, “restorative Justice.”

2.     Books by Jean Briggs, first one with the above story is from her book, Never in Anger.  Also see NPR story, “How Inuit parents raise kids without yelling”   March, 2019.

3.     Returning to the Teachings, by Rupert Ross

4.     The story of the Hollow Water community, the documentary on sexual abuse and incarceration, with a new on-line introduction to their community healing training regime: https://hiddenwatercircle.org/