A Dialogue between Jeannette Armstrong and Myron Kellner-Rogers

Jeannette: I was thinking about what you said last night about seeking community. One of the things that I understand from my people is that we all have this instinct to seek community. The yearning for community is not just psychological and emotional but actually has to do with basic things like survival. At a deeper level, that yearning for community is a seeking for home in the sense that home is land and place and family and comfort and knowing that your children are going to be safe and secure. Fragmentation of that has to do with dislocation from land, from place and from community because community resides on place.

Myron: In your community there is particular land. But most of us are not so closely associated with land.

Jeannette: For me, community is that instinctual yearning for something deeper and longer lasting. We are the land and because we're the land, the land wants to be us. We are loved by that land in a way in which we have come to understand for many generations. Community and land to us is inseparable. We could not be Okanagans in Florida. We're Okanagans because our land is a certain way and because we do things in a certain way.

Myron: What that brings up for me is how attached I am to the intellectual notion of community. What you're referencing is a much deeper, more holistic experience, and it raises all sorts of questions for me. One question is about the mobility that we experience in our society. Is that a result of being disconnected from the land so that we make decisions about moving around that just ignore place? Or this mobility factor may represent an acknowledgment of a need for connecting to place.

Also, if we are connected to one another beyond just our material forms and our material place, is it possible to create a consciousness of connectedness that doesn't require staying in one community? I don't know. I think it remains a question for our society because we are so incredibly mobile. The push to the global world organization won't be stopped. The question for me is, "How do we create and preserve new meaning about community and new realities about community in that world?"

Jeannette: When you were talking I was thinking about a comment made by one of the Native American leaders back in the early 1980s. He said that the things that need to be changed in the Western mind will happen when people leave behind the loyalties that they've carried with them and step into the Americas as they are. When you look at that statement, stepping into the Americas historically has meant bringing old constructs in terms of governance and societal process, reconfiguring them in the new world, and imposing them on societies that were already here. If that had happened in a different way, and the Europeans who came to America would have seen the Six Nations operating the great Tree of Peace and had become part of that system of relating peacefully culture to culture and respecting differences, how the history of the world might be different!

Myron: When I listened to you talk about the Okanagan this morning, one of the things that I was incredibly impressed with is how they have learned respect for the process of preserving the community and how deeply committed they are to it. I was also impressed with the fact that that process incorporates two seemingly opposite directions: seeking out, nurturing, and preserving the diversity of every member of the community, and at the same time seeking to create a coherent whole-the collective that you talked about as "our skin," the one body that we become. We don't do this work around community in our society, partly because we value individualism so greatly. There is a belief somehow locked in us that if our work is about us-about trying to achieve some common shared thing-that it will diminish my freedom.

But as I listened to your story, Jeannette, I noticed a paradox beginning to emerge-the more highly developed the collective is, the greater my individual freedom is. It seems that the more you move as an individual into an understanding and consciousness about your own identity, your own self, the greater freedom you have to deal with complexity, to respond and to try different things. But somehow in our communities we seek this incredible conformity rather than acknowledging that collaboration is about seeking difference so that we can get to commonality.

Jeannette: We've had a dialogue in my community about the accepted constructs that are "out there" in the dominant society that make hardly any sense to us, and one of them is the educational system. I feel compelled to say that the way you've compartmentalized education away from the whole system is an incredible distortion of what education is for. For me, it represents a replication of something that was brought over from Europe in terms of how things are set up to support a compartmentalization which ends up as a hierarchical process that reflects different classes. This type of compartmentalization is perpetuated through various systems so that you end up with many generations of people who are totally disassociated from land. And you have a very small group of people who are in control-landlordship by a few.

I look at the education system and I see a school board over here-not directly a part of instruction and teaching. I see the administration as separate from the school board that is making all these decisions that have an impact on everyone in the system. And then you have teachers and curriculum developers in another compartment-and the State of California deciding what is needed in the schools. And you have the parents and also the students themselves. In this system, everything is so separate and so isolated. Nobody's talking to each other or moving together.

Myron: I have to share my optimism and say that while true to a certain extent, this is a description of one part of our reality. Another part of our reality is that the great success of America is in fact its public schools. There was at some point a community that asked, "How do we bring together individuals in the community who have the wherewithal to create and maintain a just and civic society?" Part of what you're describing reveals for me why I'm so optimistic. Everyone in this room can hear the insanity of what you're describing, but ten years ago you couldn't hear it. You can hear it now-and it's not the whole story. The other part of the story is the thirst that people have for community and the fact that great teaching and learning and administration and stewardship from school boards happens in spite of that craziness.

I believe that part of what we are experiencing now is the schizophrenia of imposing a construct that we share-a mechanistic view of the world-on our experience, and right now that's causing us great pain.

One of the things I have been struck by is the incredible sense of interconnectedness that exists in your community, Jeannette, and also the lack of it in our society. It has something to do with how can we find our way out of the dilemma related to fragmentation that we find ourselves in? I believe it is by starting with the simplest connections that we can make and by always seeking to expand those connections -- to seek more information and more diversity. Your community is indigenous and it is bounded-it has a particular land-but what's interesting is that within that clear identity, your community is constantly reaching out for more connections, greater understanding, deeper learning. All the processes that you are involved in are about reaching out for more, and over time, that increases the connectedness and therefore the sustainability of the community. If a group gets fragmented and isolated, it's more difficult to sustain the community because boundaries have been created that don't allow new information to come in.

Jeannette: When I was talking about the compartmentalization in education, I was thinking about how the purpose of education in America is to develop certain knowledge and skills that correspond to the way that society currently operates.

Education is dedicated to developing minds in a way where they will successfully operate within this kind of process that has been agreed on. So our schools are set up to do that. But the things that the vast majority of Americans have agreed on are destructive to people, to land, to community, to family, to the ecosystems, to our bodies.

How many people here have been confronted with diseases, cancer and other ones, that result from that agreement that has been made? Is that agreement sacrosanct in terms of the education system? Must we maintain it or should we, using whole systems thinking, start thinking about what hasn't been thought about in the education system-particularly in terms of the land? How can we educate the children to know about the ecosystem that they are currently living in-to know the plants, the animals, the river systems? What does their biosystem consist of and what are its requirements? Those children who become ecoliterate can then create a dialogue about what must be transformed in order to listen to the land, in order to comprehend and attend to the requirements of the land. in that way, we can start becoming reconnected to the land.

I'm hopeful-especially from being in this kind of dialogue where I am able to say that land is essential in terms of community-that there will be a point in the future when there will be no cancer from the environmental conditions that have been created as a result of destroying and polluting the land because people need jobs. Education is definitely connected to land because what we teach and how we train the managers and organizers of tomorrow is definitely going to determine what ends up in our bodies.

Myron: I have to confess that I feel this incredible sense of overwhelm about how big this task is. I want to go back to what gives me hope that we could find our way through all this. What are the simple ways? One of the things that occurs to me is that everything that we're seeing now as effects in the system is based on certain agreements that we have about how to belong together. If that's true, isn't that where we could start?

Our schools too are representations of agreements-about learning, about teaching, about how to be with one another, and about where intelligence in the system is. I think the way we create different agreements about how to be together in the work we are setting about is a real basis of community.

Our work could be about surfacing what our agreements are, about how to be in this work together, about where intelligence comes from, about who should be sitting in this conversation with us. That kind of dialogue would begin a process that gives us an ability to connect with each other in new and different ways.

One of the impressive things about what you have described is how the identity of your community is deepening all the time because you're engaged in the kind of dialogue that brings forth the past into the context of who you are now. You're asking, "Who have we been? Who are we now? What is calling us forth or what should we do next?" And that keeps cycling around in some dynamic balance as you constantly renew your traditions, understand them differently and continue to ask, "What have we learned?"

The California Staff Development Council